Music Review: Glass Animals weave heartstring-tugging vignettes on new album
Love songs have existed for millennia but leave it to Glass Animals to give them a refreshing spin, where love isn’t always a honeymoon phase or heartbreak — it’s much, much more.
The British indie-pop band, known for hits like 2014’s “Gooey” or 2020’s viral “Heat Waves,” has won listeners over with its unique, often dream-like sound. Singer-songwriter Dave Bayley’s moody lyrics and simple harmonies meld with experimental instrumentals from guitarist Drew MacFarlane and bassist Edmund Irwin-Singer, who also play keys, and drummer Joe Seaward.
On Glass Animals’ fourth full album, “I Love You So Much,” Bayley’s up-and-down vocals reach the occasional falsetto and weave a different depiction of love in each song. Over the course of the 10-track album, love is beautiful, terrifying, painful, complicated, and, ultimately, what connects as all.
It’s also a tricky word for rhyming, as Bayley twists vowels to somehow match “love” with words like “apartment” and “chasm.”
The album starts strong with “Show Pony,” a catchy vignette of a complex, roller coaster relationship that Bayley grew up seeing. The summery pop-rock song tells the story of a love that burns bright off the start and then fades out until all that’s left is the memory of the good times. “When’s it going to end?/Maybe when you’re dead?” he sings. “Maybe you’re a fool/But he loved you.”
“Wonderful Nothing” introduces orchestral strings and spacey synths as Bayley sings of when hate and love collide. The track has bite to it with lyrics like “I’d say burn in hell/But they’d hate you, too,” but, nonetheless, the last line admits, “I’m trying to stop/But I still love you.”
Vast imagery of oceans and outer space are used throughout the album, signifying the lost-in-the-universe feeling Bayley says inspired the album.
In the not-as-catchy waltz “Lost in the Ocean,” Bayley questions himself and how he could be “so loved and so lonesome.” He throws up his hands at a lack of an answer: “I want to scream at the top of my lungs!”
While a simple rise-and-fall melody pattern repeats throughout the album to the point of redundancy, it gets better with every listen as the concepts in the lyrics come into focus.
See “I Can’t Make You Fall in Love Again” for an example. At first blush, it’s an awkwardly syncopated track that flips between dull and lively. But listen again and it’s a layered, emotional ballad that pulls close and pushes away a loved one from the past. The chorus is pretty catchy, too.
“I Love You So Much” is ultimately an emotional exploration of love, where it’s so complicated and yet so simple. At the end of the day, it’s all we’ve got.
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