Glasvegas ‘A Snowflake Fell (And It Felt Like A Kiss)’.

Listening to Christmas albums is usually about as rewarding as searching for cherries in a whorehouse, but recent times have seen a slew of bands roll up their sleeves and tackle the stigma – Glasvegas the latest in that line, choosing to keep up their rocketing momentum and release a Christmas album mere months after the debut landed. Keeping it bleak, their decision to record the whole shebang in a church somewhere in rural Transylvania raised a few eyebrows, but the resultant six-song mini album is set to fling the cynics back against the wall; with lashings of vampiric organ and church choirs that build like scaffolding around the monolith of Allen’s sure-footed tearjerkers: all firmly set to make your legs go wobbily until you are gibbering in twitchy ecstacy.

Busted out in roughly the same time it took Axl Rose to record one cymbal splash, ‘A Snowflake…’ is rammed with the morose brand of bruised beauty that Glasvegas are quickly becoming famous for whilst also packing more seasonal humbuggery than Scrooge getting credit crunched. Certainly, first single ‘Please Come Back Home’ sets the bar high, a plaintive call to some young waif lost in the rain, mascara running down her cheeks that makes for the natural successor to mighty first album slow-burner ‘It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry’.

Sparse, threadbare and bleaker than the inside of Sylvia Plath’s head, ‘Cruel Moon’ sound like it was crooned from the gutter by a broken booze hound and will have you scrambling for a hanky well before its rousing end whilst the title track is so emotive it could soundtrack that bit in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ that your nan likes. Meanwhile, ‘Fuck You, It’s Over’, a distant cousin of ‘Lonesome Swan’, makes its presence felt with driving U2-sired guitar and venomous spits about a Christmas-time relationship troubles that makes Shane Macgowan and Kirsty MacColl’s squabbling in ‘Fairytale Of New York’ sound like an evening with the Waltons.

Certain folk will bemoan the lack of supersmashes akin to ‘Geraldine’ and ‘Daddy’s Gone’, but coming only three months after their debut landed, it’s a wonder that Allan and the gang can knock out songs of this calibre at all. Sure, ‘A Snowflake…’ is rammed with the sort of shameless sentimentality that would normally have you kicked to death as quickly and as violently as possible round these parts, but it’s Christmas, so we’ll let the little sods off.

The Lights Of Glasvegas.

It’s like 80s indie never ended: tunes so delinquent they’d probably set your gran on fire just for something to do, played by a group who look like they were shoehorned into perma-tight black leather since early childhood and raised on nothing but feedback and cheap speed. But along with bearing all the right hallmarks of their indie rock forefathers, Glasvegas’ eponymous debut proves there is still a few original ideas left, as long as you know where to dig. Songs like ‘Daddy’s Gone’ and ‘Stabbed’ pay you the complement of being blunt in both their immediacy and emotional rawness, distorted slabs of agitpop brewed somewhere between the gutter and the stars that come on like Mogwai fronting up to Irvine Welsh in a wind tunnel. With similar bands, it can be frustrating when they attempt to make heavyweight/pertinent comments on society but present them in a form impenetrable to most sections of the society, so credit goes to Glasvegas for welding pop sensibilities to their unflinching lyrical content. Like an apple stuffed with razorblades, their future-gone-retro doo-wop sounds disguise chilling vignettes from modern life on the wrong side of the tracks.

It’s music that not only resonates in the prevailing social climate of ‘knife terror Britain etc etc’ but the band’s hype comes from a reputation built sturdily on old-fashioned touring, limited vinyl-only singles (remember them!?) and Wayfarered cool. It’s black-clad rock n roll that perfectly captures the ‘last gang in town’ mentality crafted by equally shimmering 80s indie like House Of Love or The Jesus & Mary Chain, but with the added attraction of melody and ambition. Similarly, Glasvegas’ fog of longing and regret is almost as palpable; the album documenting the lives of people who doubtless spent their lives attending more funerals than weddings. Las Vegas wasn’t built on winners, and neither are the figures of Glasvegas’ world: carrying themselves with the grizzled sneers of those who’ve seen too much too young, the songs swinging on vats of feral reverb that are brilliantly set against James Allan’s ghostly Scottish brogue that’s flecked with more bruised pathos than Alan Bennett giving a statement to the police after being chinned outside a chip shop. ‘Glasvegas’, like all the best indie pop, hinges on a mix of dark lyricism and joyfully cathartic music, especially highlights such as the bloody-but-unbowed grace of ‘Geraldine’ and ‘Go Square Go’.

The band claimed in interviews leading up to the release that they had made an “album, not just a series of tracks”. They weren’t lying. ‘Glasvegas’ feels cohesive and never dips from its upwards trajectory, the excellent ‘SAD Light’ and ‘It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry’ sounding like Phil Spector being thrown through a plate-glass window whilst singles ‘Daddy’s Gone’ and ‘Geraldine’ both boast choruses the size of Jupiter. Whereas the majority of lesser bands ploughing the old ‘social realism’ furrow are either standing too close to their influences to see the possibilities that lie beyond them or content to remain so mired in hollow McJob-hating rhetoric that they are ultimately as empty as a packet of Jaffa Cakes in Vanessa Feltz’s handbag, Glasvegas’ debut packs the promise infinitely more. Indeed, let’s hope that the media fervour that has been steadily building over the last 12 months does not capsize them – there is only so many times you can be called brilliant by all and sundry before you start to believe it (just look at Pete Doherty). Plus, things that heat up fast have a tendency to cool down quick. But if they can ride it out and crucially, come back with songs of equal grandeur next time round, the only stark realisms the band need worry about witnessing will be spotted through the tinted windows of (black) stretch-limousines as they are ferried from the stage back to another faceless hotelroom rammed with crack teams of super-groupies and binbags full of drugs. But that’ll bring a whole other set of problems…

Glasvegas: Fear & Loathing Never Sounded So Good.

 

The Jesus & Mary Chain drenched in reverb. The widescreen ambition of Phil Spector. The lyrical pathos and social realism of Johnny Cash tucked up in his penchant for dressing completely in black. A sound blanketed by the windswept drama of ‘Casablancas’ and decked with all the laconic insouciance of Interpol tottering about half-cut in their new Cuban heels. Glasvegas verve past the indie bedwetters cowering in the shallow end and strike out confidently into uncharted waters of epic melancholia. The most compelling and confident act to hail from Scotland since the nihilistic fandango of Mogwai.

 

A rag-tag bunch that came together in the heart of Glasgow only 12 months before confidently announcing their presence to the good and the few late last year with the limited vinyl release of sure-footed gem ‘Daddy’s Gone’, a song rooted in the melodies of doo-wop and 60s girl groups that disguises lyrics with a beating heart and unflinching social realism. Having since attracted the ecstatic patronage of ex-Creation Records impresario and professional goblin Alan McGee, who can be seen on YouTube waxing lyrical about them being “the best band to have come out of Glasgow in twenty years” next to an embarrassed lead singer, further hints of greatness can be found in the bruised and brooding pathos of ‘Geraldine’ and ‘Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime’. An inspired cover of ‘Be My Baby’ completes the package. After recording sessions in New York and Transylvania(!) bolstering the promise of an album filled with a similar calibre of song-writing, the remainder of 2008 could be all green lights for Glasvegas.