Imagine an analog television at 4:00 AM, tuned to a channel that is just shutting down. The transmission shifts to static, white noise. Watching it may be beautiful for a moment, but another moment longer would be madness.
“When I think about nights and the noise of the television, I never think of anyone who has company,” muses James Allan, songwriter, guitarist, singer, and frontman, “because if you had someone with you, the television wouldn’t be making noise, someone would change the channel. So there’s something that’s not quite right. Something that’s not parallel, that’s out of balance. That’s the fundamental feeling of the album. Thoughts and realizations I’ve had over the last year and a half revolve around the feeling that maybe something is quite helpless. Isolated. Something broken. The noise is an image I imagine, and all the songs are in one way or another this situation.”
Glasvegas, the most emotional band in Britain, are back. Their third album “Later...When The TV Turns To Static” opens the next chapter of their story with sincere melancholy and sky-high sadness that carries the soul into heights of lonely euphoria. Two years after their Top 10 album “Euphoric///Heartbreak\\\”, Allan wanted to “come back down to earth.” Because the years before had also been intoxicating: in 2008, they emerged as pioneers of an anthemic ‘reality rock’ by weaving Phil Spector’s monumental soundscapes with the echoes of The Ramones and The Jesus and Mary Chain into their unique Glasvegas sound. After Bono called “It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry” “one of the best songs I’ve ever heard,” their debut became a classic – produced by Flood, critically acclaimed, honored with platinum, #2 in the UK.
“Later...When The TV Turns To Static” is an emotional journey through broken relationships and “the crazy energy” of the world, set against a backdrop of infernos of endless guitars, military deployments of upright drums, and an overwhelmingly melancholic piano. Allan’s vocals are the key to his countless secrets, a devastating roar from a shattered soul that proves he is still one of the most impressive singers England has to offer. Lyrically, Allan’s talent remains daring and enchanting; some of the new songs are autobiographical, some obvious, some cryptic – nowadays even less willing to explain meanings. “Because the listener might have a better thought about it and I would ruin that. But in every song I’ve ever written, there’s a part that is me; other parts are not at all, and parts of it were me.”
The title track is an avalanche of guitars crashing towards a cliff and shattering on the shore of an acoustic daydream; the exquisite piano epic “Choices” drives us with a recording of Allan’s heartbeat at 5:00 AM into our limbs; the melancholic “Secret Truth” is a touching echo of Joy Division at their eeriest, before Allan stages himself in the lyrical “Neon Bedroom” as a teenage girl.
“Later...When The TV Turns To Static” is a lesson in absolute creative independence, recorded and produced in Glasgow’s Gorbals Studio with a vintage mixing console that once belonged to Decca Records, by a band that you can hear has grown even closer through the intense time on tour: James Allen, Rab Allan, Paul Donoghue, and Jonna Lofgren. “I like people, I like strangers and in some ways we’ve stayed morally grounded, but in others not at all,” Allan clarifies. “We don’t want to go to bed early. We want to go on and on and on. In a way, we’re fucking madmen living as if every gig is the last one.”
