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review by Dene Bebbington This time Andy Condon (the man behind The Glimmer Room) has gone for a one track long form approach in contrast to his debut Tomorrow's Tuesday which has a lot of relatively short highly rhythmic and melodic tracks. While he still uses some synth pop motifs, the one long track (over forty two minutes) comes across as an exploration of various moods and emotions so that one can consider it to be divided into movements. One interesting thing to note is that he developed it so that one hour of work translated to a minute of music. The cover art for the CD is a sepia tinged picture of an English country lane. Couple that with how the album opens with the sound of birdsong that is reminiscent of the opening of John Foxx's Cathedral Oceans and you get the impression that it's going to be a work with a definite "Englishness". Besides the birdsong there are lots of other sampled sounds occurring at various points throughout, some obvious examples are buzzing bees, church bells, a steam train, and what I think may be a World War II propeller plane flying overhead. For around the first fifteen minutes the mood is reflective and sometimes subdued, a syncopated harpsichord like refrain is heard early on and then this gives way to ethereal voice effects and subtle background drones before becoming a little dark and slightly losing its way musically. Over the next fifteen minutes or so the sound becomes more typical of what I'd expect from Andy with pleasant rhythms and melodies coupled with processed voice effects in some places. It's here that the somewhat synth pop dulcet tones make their appearance and have a more mature feel than in Tomorrow's Tuesday. Finally, the last movement explores some of the reflective territory heard in the first movement and ends as a mirror of the beginning with birdsong and church bells. Having been won over by The Glimmer Room's debut on the first listen I was expecting to like Grey Mirrors but it has surpassed my expectations and is a real gem that if anything gets better the more I listen to it. Somehow it seems to capture the way one's thoughts and mood can change over the course of a lazy day when there's the time and space to reflect on life and just to watch the world go by. Highly recommended. |
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