Lavender Flu – Mow The Glass
A third the size of its sprawling predecessor, Mow The Glass is Portland noise-maker Chris Gunn’s follow-up to his Lavender Flu debut, the former Hunches guitarist taking the opportunity to flex his song-writing skills and landing a gorgeous piece of lightly psychedelic guitar-pop in the process. Heavy Air was conversely an out-an-out weirdo psych-folk record that was wildly experimental in scope, stretched and warped by druggy noise and artsy sound collages, variously recalling Woods, Spectre Folk, The Velvet Underground and/or Richard Youngs as it went.
Drawing now on a full-band set-up, there are evidently more voices to reign in some of Gunn’s excesses, but Mow The Glass’s poppier seeds were very much cultivated on Heavy Air nonetheless, then as now, for example, almost every track still coming in at under three minutes (bar, here, the fun soloing of album closer ‘Ignorance Restored’). Imperfectly perfect to a track, dusty lo-fi melodies take a veritable tour of the 60s; the album’s jangles and whistling will appeal to the Kevin Morby crowd, scrappy garage-psych blasters an in for the Black Lips gang, high and dry shuffles like “Just Like Anything” a pure gold Nugget lying on the surface of the searing desert.
Gunn makes a success of whatever he touches, the standout “Leaking Past” rolling along slackly in the vein of all of history’s best ramshackle punk-rock while the pedal steel comes out for the beautiful sighing of “Distant Beings”, a heavy-hearted alt-country lament with the ghost of late 50s rock n’ roll in its DNA. With a deeply rich musical cast, you’ll also meet odd ragas, sleepy swells and – on a track like “Floor Lord” – blown-out noise too. Gunn remains greatly revered on the underground, which is apt as Mow The Glass, no matter how well it’s brushed itself up as a bedroom opus, is still more at ease in the basement. When Heavy Air came together though it did so seemingly by accident. The difference now is that Mow The Glass knows exactly what it’s doing.
Best track: “Leaking Past”
~Mow The Glass is released August 3rd 2018 via In The Red.~