Review Summary: Asian glow up
Say what you will about this fresh crop of emo bedroom artists, they don’t slack off one bit - least of all Asian Glow. For my money, he’s the most exciting of the
Downfall of the Neon Youth & co. e-scene, and this isn’t just code for ‘best’: the rapid development of his sound over the past 15 months has been a wonder to follow. His breakout record
Cull Ficle was essentially an hour’s worth of Midwest-inflected
The Glow Pt. 2 worship; his contributions to the landmark
Downfall of the Neon Youth split with Parannoul and Sonhos Tomam Conta beefed this up with a post-hardcore bent; and now, the noise pop shrapnel from his exploding seedpod of a collaboration with Weatherday has apparently found fertile soil and burgeoned into a bloody forest in the
three months since that release. What a time to be alive; what a lot to keep up with.
The
new new Asian Glow
Stalled Flutes, means is at once a consolidation of every palette he’s worked in so far and yet another bold step forward. It’s at once the most focused, most demanding and most satisfying thing he (or any of his echelon) has produced thus far, and I have found myself tantalised, drained, overwhelmed and eventually delighted by it in turn, over as many listens as I’ve thrown at any 2022 album within a single week of discovery. There is, uh, a
lot to pick apart here and it takes an unusual amount of patience for a record geared towards sensory overload, but the stakes are very much there. Let’s get you started - please approach this album with expectations of:
1) deeply slurred English over the buzz of lo-fi acoustic guitars
2) the kind of string sections that should come with a horsepower advisory, and
3) some of the most delicious folktronica stylings I have ever heard on a rock album, period (a big step forward from the experimentation on his
pt.2345678andstill EP).
All of these happen at once, every song, most of the time, and with bedroom production and a whole lotta residual lo-fi, it comes off like a bloody maze at first. On first listen, I found it a struggle to latch onto anything at all beyond the general aesthetic and an intuitive feeling that there was something special lurking under that tangle. Hours later, this turned out to be the case: the sprawl of those arrangements camouflages songwriting far more streamlined than
Weatherglow’s and more dynamic than most of
Cull Ficle. Most of these tracks are actually grounded in robust structures, but have a habit of laying on so many tones so thick that their repetitious qualities get lost in the blur. Take the stellar third song, “Faltering Waver” (the emo condition in two words if ever I saw it): this track initially caught my ear with an electronic loop that takes centre stage at around the 2:40 mark, yet I had something approaching a gripe with the way Asian Glow quickly jettisons it for an ensuing string climax rather than building on it any further. However, I later clocked that the loop in question is unobtrusively layered from the start of the song and that its ‘entrance’ at 2:40 is simply a cutaway. Something about the track has clicked since then; it’s twice as infectious being able to follow the carefully presented ambitions behind ideas I first saw as throwaway.
This kind of familiarisation is key to the album, but internalising the innermost workings of an entire hour of emo ramble is a practically uncivilised level of dedication. To this end, “Look Close, Nose the Reflection” is absolutely indispensable, practically a guide rail for the rest of the tracklist. Its protracted pacing is a gift: as Asian Glow reaches for something a little more lofty with a little more patience, he lays down at once the longest and most accessible track of the lot and backs it with the album’s strongest melodies and most breathtaking buildups. Its digestible breakdown of the matrix at work on every other song is equal parts a Rosetta stone moment for the album and a defining snapshot of the painfully ephemeral wonder that flows through the whole thing like quicksilver. Asian Glow’s lyrics are a hive of anxiety and his delivery as laden with passionate semblances of jadedness as any emo vocalist, but there’s something almost childlike about the way the album’s wide-eyed strivings for the unattainable. You can hear the force of the
moment Asian Glow captures for a moment precisely in his desperate final note on “Look Close…”; you can sense the grandeur as the song finally prepares to settle into the peak it’s spent the best part of nine minutes towards; you can feel the grace and harmony of all things coming together, and you can feel the immediate resignation in his voice as he lets go of the track the instant it peaks, as though no corny crescendo could ever package the yearning that threatens to tear his voice apart entirely. The track ends without further ado, its statement made. Though tallest and most majestic, it’s just one moment on an album teeming with moments building and moments escaping: grasp one, however fleetingly and you can grasp them all. There is magic to be found here; it is, as they say, a real one.
