Album Review: Autumn, Again by A Sunny Day in Glasgow

You know how some records just beg to be played on nighttime drives? Ack, sorry I asked. It’s a well-flagellated cliché to describe certain music — anything Bristol Sound, The xx, Tindersticks, and so on — as “three-AM music” or the like. Well, Autumn, Again, the newest musical dispatch from the ultra-industrious and under-appreciated A Sunny Day in Glasgow, feels like six-AM music.

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The standard form-follows-function justification for dream-pop's aural clutter goes something like this: Because the music focuses on memories and emotional pasts, it makes sense that it's fuzzy, ambiguous, and rose-tinted. That's what memories are like, after all. Or so the arguments go. So sometimes the most refreshing thing about A Sunny Day in Glasgow is that they seem to remember that dreams aren't vague recitations, they're constructions.

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Being a reviewer means that you sometimes come across an item by a band that has been publically lauded in other quarters and have to tell the world that, well, the Emperor is really wearing no clothes. Naturally, this doesn’t make one popular sometimes, but it’s a dirty job that someone has to do. This is the task that is before me in reviewing the latest album by A Sunny Day in Glasgow, a Philadelphia-based shoegaze band that has actually gotten a lot of glowing press in the last few years, despite the fact that the band has gone through numerous personnel changes (including everything from band members suffering broken bones to a desire to pursue college).

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I often wonder if pop music will run out of melodies. I just can’t imagine that with the thousands of songs being created and published each day that the spectrum of musical combinations which most humans (popular music) find pleasing is infinite. I picture the critic of the future as an archeologist, digging through the archive of recorded melodies and running queries to determine if a new release is melodically unique.

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