Review Summary: A promising but inconsistent debut from British post rock/slowcore duo Glissando; Sometimes it's stunning, other times it's boring as all hell, but most of the time it just makes the listener want to give singer Elly May Irving a hug.
I'm having some issues with a friend of mine. He's generally pretty cool to chill with but occasionally gets unexplainable mood swings that make him just
insist that he's a horrible person. I try to help out, but he's quite intent on duking it out with his emotions, so I end up just sort of giving him space and waiting for him to be ok again.
British experimental/post rock duo Glissando reminds me of that friend. Glissando, signed to budding post rock force Gizeh Records, is oozing with potential to be really cool, but simply has too many flaws and is simply too damn frustrating to fulfill that promise. Glissando “is and always has been” Elly May Irving and Richard Knox, two people whose fractured relationship may or may not have had an effect on their expansive and pretentiously titled debut record,
With Our Arms Wide Open We March Towards the Burning Sea. It wouldn’t be all that big a shock if it had. Sadness seeps from all corners of
With Our Arms Wide Open…, with messages like
”Forever a mystery you will be to me. If you thought I had time for love, did you think I would be here?”
Subtle.
Unsurprisingly, the music behind
With Our Arms Wide Open… is equal parts miserable and ethereal; giant keyboards and heart wrenching strings soak melancholy piano melodies in a sort of hazy twilight, which in turn provide an expansive canvas for Irving’s beautifully seductive vocals to paint portraits of loneliness and gloom. This all sounds like great stuff, and it should be: it’s just that Irving’s portraits are poorly executed. The lyrics on
With Our Arms Wide Open… sound like ridiculous caricatures of adolescent diary-scribbles, sometimes passing unnoticed, other times completely destroying Glissando’s intended effect. For example, the slickly produced “Grekken” is ruined by a more hilarious than tragic chanting of
”You made me kill myself!” and the incoherent lyrics of “Floods” prove the only negative in an otherwise ace blend of swirling slowcore and hypnotizing ambience. It’s one thing to be dark, but as Glissando gets more and more base,
With Our Arms Wide Open… gets more and more mediocre.
For Glissando, gloom is a double-edged sword. On the plus side, it makes tracks like “With a Kiss and a Tear” gorgeously sad through sweeping strings and dramatic piano-pounding to deliver what is easily the album’s best moment. On the other side, it allows songs like the ridiculously boring “Like Everything You See,” a fifteen minute soundscape song of
nothing that irrevocably kills all the record’s momentum. Which side does
With Our Arms Wide Open… cut with more? The album pretty much goes half and half: Most of the record finds a good blend between post rock bull (“Always the Storm” features readings from D.H. Lawrence) and straightforward songs, with occasional full-fledged commitments to both. Sometimes this works, as in the chillingly mumbled “Goodbye Red Rose! This Was Not for You,” other times it doesn’t. “White Silence and the Fragile Reality” falls in the latter category, with bare piano leaving Irving’s lyrical trip ups unveiled and ugly. Slips like this make
With Our Arms Wide Open… equal parts engaging and boring: One minute everything comes together in a frighteningly chilling tenacity, the next its maddeningly dull.
In the end, it’s this inconsistency that dooms
With Our Arms Wide Open We March Towards the Burning Sea for nothing more than mediocrity.
Everything about this album is frustrating in that it could be fantastic with a little bit better execution. Elly May Irving’s voice, a dejected soprano reminiscent of Beth Gibbons, sometimes sounds like a potential force within the genre and other times sounds inane and superfluous. Similarly, Glissando’s penchant for Eluvium-esque soundscapes can sometimes lead them to create something powerful like “Our Flags Wave and Our Arms are Around Another’s Shoulders” and then create insanely boring snoozefests like “Like Everything You See.” If Glissando works out the flaws, they can succeed. For now, we’re left to accept their issues and move on.
