The music of Glass Ghost, a Brooklyn duo assisted on Idol Omen by guest stars like Luke Temple and Joan Wasser, is eerie and elusive-- the musical equivalent of a word on the tip of your tongue. Eliot Krimsky sings about everyday mysteries in a relaxed, uncanny falsetto, tending to keyboards that dryly flicker and drone. Instruments from the classical world, as well as various junk percussion and vocal harmonies, meld unobtrusively, with the same laconic drift. The songs feel paradoxically compact and diffused, thanks to Mike Johnson's careful blend of live and electronic drums. His gauze-wrapped take on hip-hop makes all the wispy scrollwork feel unaccountably durable and lively.
Just looking through Glass Ghost's early press clues you in to the difficulties of classifying them-- people have already cited Deerhoof, Captain Beefheart, Dirty Projectors, and J Dilla, comparisons that range from approximate to baffling. Glass Ghost truly resemble just one band I can think of, and them only abstractly: the Dismemberment Plan circa Change, whittled down to the most salient gestures. It's all there on opening track "Time Saving Trick"-- the hip-hop swing disarticulated in shining banks of fog, the wafting existentialism, the unspoken melancholy. And "Mechanical Life", with pointillist bass and skating keyboards, is mostly about brushing your teeth in a mirror. It perfectly captures the sort of mundane, displaced, anxious introspection that the Dismemberment Plan borrowed from Talking Heads and ran with so fruitfully.
That said, Glass Ghost is less lovable than the Dismemberment Plan-- perhaps less ingratiating. They're relentlessly sleepy and captivating, all "Sentimental Man" and no "Following Through". The complacent tonal register, Krimsky's dusky singing, and the deliberate scrawniness of the music all promise to be highly divisive, as most unique things are. And there are a few moments when the taste level falters-- on "Ending", when Krimsky sings, "There's a place way up high where I hold my soul and cry," you hope he gets back to cryptic circumlocution quickly. "The Same" sports a poppier, more bugged-out look that Glass Ghost wear a bit less comfortably than swirling evasion. They're at their best on "Time Saving Device" and "Mechanical Life", not to mention "Divisions", with its ice-drop synth arpeggios, or "Like a Diamond", where a piercing vocal melody floats over keyboards like reflected clouds on scattered rain puddles. This is subtle, spooked, reflective music-- a distracted elegy for something or other.
