Dorks And Losers

I hate to say it, but I am old enough to remem­ber that MTV used to be a cable chan­nel that actu­ally had music-related pro­gram­ming. I sel­dom watch the chan­nel now that I am also old enough to not really care or like its cur­rent reality-heavy programming.

Lis­ten­ing to Danish/American trio Gliss’ Lang­som Dans made me nos­tal­gic for that bygone era when my par­ents listed MTV as a restricted chan­nel, but I think it had more to do with the sex­ual con­tent than the play­ing of satan’s music (though to be fair they didn’t really like rock very much either).

I guess they believed music should be always uplift­ing and pos­i­tive, or at least sound uplift­ing and pos­i­tive (dis­clo­sure: my par­ents were John Den­ver fans). That’s not to say the Gliss’ third full-length album isn’t uplift­ing or pos­i­tive, it’s just that my par­ents prob­a­bly wouldn’t have got­ten into it and prob­a­bly would have asked me to change the channel.

Before Lang­som Dans, there were wide­spread com­par­isons to Jesus And Mary Chain and My Bloody Valen­tine, and the band still makes true to those influ­ences and rela­tion­ships. The trio (Mar­tin Kling­man, Vic­to­ria Cecilia, David Reiss) is mel­lower and sub­dued this time around with few, if any, harsh riffs, that instead yield to long atmos­pheric crescen­dos and lin­ger­ing reverbs.

The anthemic cries on “A To B” are haunt­ing and seem­ingly echo end­lessly. Sonic dream­scapes res­onate through­out the album, though there is notice­able con­trast in styles between the two vocal leads. It only seems dour on tracks that don’t fea­ture Cecilia’s vocals; “Into The Water” would be almost indis­tin­guish­able from the sub­se­quent “Weight Of Love” if not for Cecilia’s Nina Gordon-like (co-founder of Veruca Salt) calm­ing voice on the lat­ter track.

At this point of the album, the music sounds like it’s on cruise con­trol, as “Blur” and “Hunt­ing” feel like repeats. “Waves” could eas­ily be in the same boat, but the strings are sur­pris­ingly pleas­ant and a wel­come change from the pro­gres­sively moody mixes on ear­lier tracks. Unfor­tu­nately, “The Sea Tonight” is eas­ily the best song on the album; the up-tempo sea­side pop sound is so invit­ing with its pos­i­tiv­ity and energy (with lyrics like “I know your heart will always be all right… all right”) that it makes the rest of the album seem so dreary in comparison.

That’s not to say that Lang­som Dans isn’t a worth­while lis­ten; it is, but as Gliss got going I guess I was expect­ing some­thing more and dif­fer­ent. I guess times do change.

Face­book: http://www.facebook.com/officialgliss

[photo via Riot Act Media]

Note: Arti­cle first pub­lished as Music Review: Gliss — Lang­som Dans on Blogcritics.