By Neil McCormick
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/
5:04PM BST 01 Apr 2011
Rating: * * * *
Columbia, £12.99
Rock may be in creative and commercial decline but there are still some things it does better than any other kind of music: big, anthemic, emotional commitment and release. Scottish four piece Glasvegas do these simple things better than most.
Built around the vulnerable, angst-filled crooning of frontman and songwriter James Allan, Glasvegas play straightforward, melodic songs constructed around familiar chord changes amped up so that effects-laden guitar distortion crashes out of the speakers with all the sonic grandeur of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, a sparkling bed of harmonic spikes and melodic accidents.
On their second album, Glasvegas evoke the ambient intensity of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music while anchoring it in songs that demand actual commitment from the listener. I worry about where they can go next with such a restrictive musical template, but here they have managed subtle refinement without sacrificing the essence of their primitive appeal.
There is a sense of flow to this set, building from intimate beginning to a genuinely euphoric climax before tailing off with wistful beauty. You have really to listen to penetrate Allan’s thick Scots accent, but as the sound opens up you discover nuances amid the noise.
Allan’s swooping melodies hint at a Roy Orbison style flair for reshaping classic rock into heartbreaking epics, and lyrics enacting the political as highly personal dramas.
It’s like a marriage of the Clash, the Smiths, the Pixies and the Jesus And Mary Chain, delivered with a passion and purpose that makes much-hyped rock saviours the Vaccines sound as vacuous as they really are.
At a time when questions are being asked about how posh rock music has become, Glasvegas are staunchly working-class heroes. Allan grew up in a single-parent family on an estate in Glasgow, experiencing years of unemployment and poverty before forming this band with his cousins. He is a tortured, sensitive soul, who clearly struggles with a lot of the prejudices of his environment.
The heart of their superb 2008 debut was 'Daddy’s Gone', a song of abandonment. Here too he sings with aching bewilderment about such themes as desire and loss, but he also embraces the kind of difficult topics that might force some sections of his audience to confront their assumptions.
'I Feel Wrong and Stronger Than Dirt' are subtitled 'Homosexuality part 1 and 2'. As the titles suggest, there is nothing arch or clever about Allan’s writing, but in its bold stating of sincere feeling lies its true power. Glasvegas are a band their audience can believe in, and that is exactly what rock needs right now.
Related:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/neilmccormick/3814349/Glasvegas-how-they-thundered-to-greatness.html
Fear and loathing in Glasvegas
By BRIAN BOYD
The Irish Times
http://www.irishtimes.com/
Monday, March 28, 2011
After the immediate success of his debut album, footballer-turned-rock-star James Allan found himself in a Chicago hotel singing ‘Close To You’ to his pet goldfish. This time around there’s less pressure . . .
AS HE WAS carried out of the backstage area of a rock festival on a stretcher due to a drug overdose, Glasvegas singer James Allan told people staring at him, “It’s not how it looks.” Unfortunately it was exactly how it looked.
Glasvegas were one of the big draws at the 2009 Coachella festival (the US equivalent of Glastonbury) and at the time, the official reason given for Allan not being able to perform was the old reliable “exhaustion and dehydration”.
In rock terms you can break the code of the euphemisms easily enough. “Fruit and flowers” (as on a backstage rider) is cocaine and groupies while “exhaustion and dehydration” can be anything from a psychotic breakdown to a Class A overload.
Allan’s crash and burn came six months after the release of the band’s self-titled album – a magnificent work that artfully combined the guitar noise of Jesus and Mary Chain with the orchestral production of Phil Spector. Easily the best album of 2009, Allan, now 31, says it was too much success too quickly.
“My head just wasn’t in the right place. I was exaggerating all the bad things about success,” he says. “I had been a professional footballer all my life [he played for Cowdenbeath and other Scottish league teams] and while most people who want to be in a rock band practise for a few years and learn how to write songs, all the songs on the first album were my very first attempts.
“One moment I was on the dole, the next I was on the front cover of music magazines. In fact, I remember signing on one day and producing a newspaper with mention of my name in it to the woman behind the counter. She hadn’t believed me when I told her I was in a rock band.”
What distinguished the first Glasvegas album was how, despite lyrically coming across as particularly bleak, it was so sonically extravagant. Allan wrote about racial murder ( 'Flowers and Football Tops '), absentee fathers ( 'Daddy’s Gone' ) and heroic social workers ( 'Geraldine' ).
“All music is influenced by your environment,” he says. “I wrote those songs while on the dole in Glasgow and I honestly never knew they would end up on the record – or even that there would be a record. The press said they were ‘theme’ songs but it was what I saw happening around me. I was never into the usual sort of ‘escapist’ lyrics – I prefer real events. 'Flowers and Football Tops' is about a true story – a teenager in Glasgow was stabbed to death then drenched in petrol and set alight near where I lived. I just couldn’t shake that story off.”
He found himself feted by the indie gods and traipsing from one award ceremony to the next – and it didn’t sit well with him. A desperately shy and ferociously intelligent character, Allan found “the road” hard going and on a Kings Of Leon tour in the US he became strangely attached to two goldfish.
“My sister gave them to me as a birthday present and I think I was going a bit mad at the time with the constant touring. I remember taking the goldfish to the zoo in Chicago with me and there’s some video footage of me somewhere on the 33rd floor of a hotel singing The Carpenters’ 'Close To You' to them. Yeah, that was strange alright.”
He went missing for a week in September 2009. He was supposed to show up at the Mercury Music Prize Awards (Glasvegas had been nominated) but neither bandmates, management nor label could get in touch with him.
“I wasn’t being disrespectful to the Mercury, I would have loved to have been there – I used to love sports day at school,” he says. “It’s just I was supposed to fly down to London to meet up with the rest of the band but at the airport I just decided to go and visit a friend in New York instead. The problem was I had no mobile phone – so no one could get in touch with me.
“The worst part of that, though, was my father going down to his local shop in Glasgow. The headline on one of the newspapers was ‘Glasvegas singer is missing for past five days’ and they had this on the billboard thing outside the shop. He was really upset. But I got in touch with everyone and now I do have my own mobile phone.”
TO RECORD THE follow-up album, Allan decided to write it well away from Glasgow.
“I wanted somewhere completely different and when we were touring around the US I remembered getting off the bus in Santa Monica one time and having the feeling it would be a great place to write an album. I wanted to see what would happen if you took a person out of his natural environment – and how that would effect the music. So I hassled my manager for ages and eventually we got this big beach house and moved in for a few months. I remember it being horrendously expensive so feeling under pressure to come up with the songs quickly.”
Endless strolls at night on Santa Monica beach helped him get over the overdose, and over the goldfish. “I had gone from being a nobody on the dole to a somebody and this was the first time I had to slowly and surely put myself back together,” he says.
“As a rock star you can think of yourself as important but when we went into Los Angeles you’d find yourself sitting beside Dustin Hoffman in a restaurant. And then you think of all the darkness of the rock ’n’ roll persona and how certain people are attracted to and fascinated by that. I remember walking along that beach – and it was a place of such natural beauty – and asking myself why I wanted to be in a band in the first place and trying to get back to the start again somehow. And it’s a funny thing but places of great natural beauty can make you very sad – there had been heartbreak in my life and that’s what came out on the album.”
Entitled Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\ , Allen explains the slashes are all important as they represent “the ascent, the crest of a wave and then the crash”. Eschewing the bruised social commentary of its predecessor it’s just as musically lush but a lot more introspective lyrically.
“There was a lot of uncertainty because the canvas was so blank,” he says. “But then I starting digging very deep – maybe in an unhealthy way – and then I got myself into this position . . . it’s hard to explain but it’s like as if everything around you goes silent, the sort of feeling I used to get when I was dribbling around players as a footballer, and the songs just came.
“ I really felt a lot less pressure with this one because now we’re sort of an established band – with the first one we just had no idea what was going to happen.”
Regret and contrition bleed out of almost every track. “They’re very personal, they’re very honest, but I felt that was the only way,” says Allan. “You’ve probably gathered by now that I’m a bit impressionable and the songs here are from the last two to three years when I was at my most impressionable. I did a lot and I learnt a lot. And I think the title of the album says it all.”
Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\ is out now
Glasvegas get euphoric over second album
James Allan and his bandmates return after a long lay-off.
By Alan Morrison
The Herald (Scotland)
http://www.heraldscotland.com/
29 Mar 2011
With Glasvegas it's always about the clash of extremes. It starts with the band's name, as the grit of Scotland's west coast slaps up against the glitz of the American Dream. Then it becomes a statement of intent within the music itself, as distorted guitars and a thumping beat envelop doo-wop melodies and Phil Spector soundscapes.
This was the lifeblood of Glasvegas's self-titled debut album, and it's even more prominent on the follow-up. EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ goes one step further than its predecessor, forcing those extremes, those contradictions, into its very title. Again, it's there in the music, as heavy textures of guitar, keyboards and adrenaline-rush drumming contrast sharply with the raw emotions of fragile lyrics.
"For good or bad, I try to avoid mediocrity and things being in the middle," admits singer and songwriter James Allan. "But that can sometimes get us into trouble ..."
This approach has split audiences into those who are set alight by the fire in the belly of songs like 'Daddy's Gone', 'Geraldine' and 'Go Square Go', and those who think Allan, hidden behind his rock-star Ray-Bans, is a bit arrogant and pretentious. It has also seen Glasvegas's debut album go platinum and pick up a much-deserved Mercury Prize nomination while the band dipped a steel-capped toe in the stadium lifestyle via support slots with U2 and Kings Of Leon.
It's a truth, not a cliche, to say that such success carries an emotional toll. Rather than join his band mates at the Mercury Prize ceremony in September 2009, Allan went awol in New York. A few days later, however, they all met up in Boston for the beginning of the Kings Of Leon tour, and although the band claim that reports of a later incident in Chicago were much exaggerated and merely the end product of Allan larking about on his birthday (the music gossip pages made much of him wearing only a bathrobe and singing Carpenters songs to his goldfish), exhaustion was clearly setting in. So much so that drummer Caroline McKay called it a day in March 2010.
Now, after a year away from the media glare, most of it spent writing and recording in a three-storey beach house in Santa Monica, Glasvegas are back with a new album, a new drummer and an escalating series of live dates. They've been easing latest recruit Jonna Lofgren in with low-key gigs (including a Scottish tour in early January that stretched from Orkney to Hawick), testing out new material along the way. But it's the album (released on April 4 with U2 and PJ Harvey producer Flood behind the desk) that's going to be the real focus of attention.
Musically, it's more ambitious, more layered, than the debut disc. Words-wise, it's a world apart from what typically passes for rock lyrics today. 'The World Is Yours', 'Shine Like Stars' and 'Euphoria Take My Hand' thrive on punch-the-air choruses set to ecstatic surges of energy; 'Lots Sometimes', with its vocal repetitions and acceleration of pace, is a set-list classic-in-waiting.
But it's on other tracks, where Allan strips his emotions bare then goes deep inside himself to make dark and personal discoveries, that EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ distinguishes itself. More often than not, the singer then filters those feelings through different voices, reaching for understanding or forgiveness and finding empathy by crafting characters and poetic short stories in song. These might be the perspectives of gay characters (on 'Stronger Than Dirt' and 'I Feel Wrong') or a prison inmate (closing track 'Change'); but they're the means for Allan to comfortably express and examine his own feelings.
"If you're too detached from the song, the bottom line is going to be hard to find," he explains. "But if you're not arm's length away from it, I think it becomes over-emotional. The direction, the focus, the execution of words on any poetic level - you're never going to deliver them the best way. I was right in the moment writing some of the songs on this album but, in a lot of ways, I sort of wasn't there. I was arm's length away from it, so that I could actually see it and execute it in the right way.
"It was the same with the first album. I wasn't sitting writing 'Daddy's Gone' crying into a sheet of paper. I actually had quite little emotion in me when I was writing that song. But I had a daydream, though; it was a total daydream. There's a difference between losing yourself in that little wormhole-imagination thing and being totally emotional when you're writing. There's a total hardcore focus, but it's not a total over-emotional focus."
The crossover point - and arguably the emotional high point of the album - is 'Dream Dream Dreaming', in which Allan puts words into his own father's mouth concerning the suicide of the singer's uncle. Initially the song came about as a response to 'Daddy's Gone', probably Glasvegas's best known track, which articulated, in uncompromising terms, a boy's bitter frustration with the father who had abandoned the family home.
" 'Daddy's Gone' was only one side of the coin with my father," Allan says now. "I felt a bit guilty about that song because who's to say what's round the corner for all of us, you know? I'd go on TV shows, and people would ask about it and say things about my father, and although it was only a snapshot in three minutes or whatever, it sort of ran away with itself. And I felt bad about that.
"But there were times when I'd be walking down the street, and a guy would come up to me and say how the song is about his life, how it relates to him so well, how it recognised the pain in him. Who am I to argue with those things? Who am I to say if it's right or wrong to write that song? A lot of other people have connected with it, so I'm still a fortunate person for that."
Through his love for American pop songs from the past, Allan made the mental leap from what he imagined to be his father's thoughts on the loss of his brother, to the romantic, almost tragic yearning that he hears in the likes of 'Mr Sandman' and 'All I Have To Do Is Dream'.
"I was fascinated by a human longing for something lost and something gained, something wanted and something unwanted. I was also fascinated by thinking about what a dream was. Sometimes in life, the only way to gain any kind of relief over something is through a dream. If that's all you've got, then you'll take it; you'll take anything because the longing can be that painful. Every time I go to see my father, he'll talk about his brother, every single time. He just misses him ... I've always got a picture of my uncle when we're playing that song. My dad's not actually heard it yet, but he'll hear it soon."
Allan's mother also has her place on the album, a very real physical presence on the closing track as she voices the fictional mother telling her son, about to be released from prison, to "be not led into temptation / And dare to resist not re-offending again".
"It was funny," Allan remembers. "When my mum came into the studio, she was telling Flood how to produce and telling me to swap the words around. She was like Diana Ross - bang, out the door, one take. It was the last song, and we were trying to get the rest of the songs to match each other. It was really sweet because I knew she was feeling under pressure about it. She never mentioned it, though, because she didn't want any extra pressure to go on me. Maybe I'm the guy with experience of a recording studio compared to the experience she's had, but, even in that moment, she's thinking to herself, 'I'm the mother, and I need to alleviate any pressure I can. I'll take the strain.'"
So, was there a blurring between the fiction of the lyric and the fact of the situation? "Even in the recording studio, man, she was playing the role of my mother and I was still the child," Allan agrees. "It's a memory that I'll always cherish. And she did say, 'Just think, boys: if this is the last song that you ever do, then mine is the last voice on the record ...'"
EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ is released on April 4. Glasvegas play Aberdeen Music Hall on April 23; HMV Picture House, Edinburgh on April 24; and O2 Academy, Glasgow on April 25.
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