When MySpace lost 12 years’ worth of audio files during a server migration last year, many grieved the loss of what had been a formative source of music discovery. Sure, the site has been a shell of its former self for years now, but the phrase “MySpace music” still feels inextricable from a certain irreverent, malleable sound. Los Angeles’ glass beach breathes life into those audacious bygone trends. Their idiosyncratic debut, the first glass beach album, is a whirlwind of post-emo maximalism, fusing mid-aughts pop-punk with synthy, sugarcoated chiptune. Combined with a mid-century jazz flourish and a few ambient interludes, it makes for one of the more bizarrely inventive recent rock albums.
Glass beach came together sometime around 2015 under singer and multi-instrumentalist J. McClendon, then working under their solo alias Casio Dad. Future bandmates William White and Jonas Newhouse were DJs together at a college radio station in Minnesota, where they occasionally played Casio Dad tracks. A real-life friendship was born, and the trio began making music together in LA. Though glass beach’s unique confluence of influences appears tailored to a niche audience, they’ve found loyal devotees and a measure of underground buzz. Supporters championed the band with such earnestness that Run for Cover has reissued the first glass beach album on vinyl just eight months after its initial Bandcamp release.
Glass beach separates lengthy bursts of electro-punk (“bedroom community,” “yoshi’s island,” “dallas”) with shorter, palette-cleansing instrumentals. “I’ve always just been more into the idea of listening to a whole album all the way through,” McClendon has explained, a philosophy that keeps the sequence feeling orderly even amid its most frantic exaggerations. One such moment is the opening track, “classic j dies and goes to hell part 1,” a jazzy opus best described as The Black Parade off-Broadway. It’s the most overblown track here, but if you can bear it, more polished moments throughout the rest of the record are their own reward.
While glass beach most immediately call to mind recent cyber-pop phenomenons like 100 gecs, they cite the influence of the Brave Little Abacus, an obscure, short-lived emo group from New England with a similar affinity for experimental electronic elements not often heard in rock music. “bedroom community” fits a traditional piano solo between passages that evoke classic video game soundtracks, while the first portion of “dallas” taps into minimal Midwest emo before breakneck synths take over. There’s as much pop-punk and math rock here as there are cartoonish embellishments. But despite the laundry list of resemblances—American Football’s odd time signatures, the Octopus Project’s theremin hooks—nothing on glass beach sounds copied and pasted.
The band falls short when their subject matter starts to rely on hackneyed mid-aughts emo tropes: “I’m always making a list of all the people I’d help if I wasn’t helpless myself,” McClendon croons on “bone skull.” “cold weather” has little to add to its description of a relationship conducted over text: “I love the way you make me feel/When I’m staring at my screen/At 4 a.m., trying not to fall asleep/And you hit me up just to see if I’m OK.” But even when glass beach’s lyrics feel slight, they deliver them with conviction—a confidence that comes from committing to artistic decisions hardly anyone else would make. They’ve learned that genuine connection sometimes means forgetting about trying to appeal to the masses.
Buy: Rough Trade
