glass beach pack a discography’s worth of ideas into a single song. Ringleader J. McClendon mines prog rock, emo, jazz fusion and hardcore punk as touchstones, infusing them with a frenetic sense of turmoil that’s at times inscrutable but nevertheless affecting. Their penchant for waxing philosophical over labyrinthine arrangements has been a staple of glass beach since their 2019 debut, the wonderfully titled the first glass beach album. The end result is like wandering an amusement park with every possible theme blending into another: medieval into carnivalesque, cartoonish into futuristic, horrific into beachy. Yet, it somehow all works.
This is the feat that the Los Angeles band pulls off on their second album, plastic death. On paper, it may seem like an unfocused mess, but they execute everything with stylistic flair. Take lead single “the CIA,” which shifts from math rock noodling, to prog rhythms and, finally, to a hardcore breakdown. There’s also “200,” which starts off as a piano ballad before embracing jazz, power-pop and heart-on-sleeve emo mere moments later. McClendon’s uncanny ability to blend so many starkly disparate styles this smoothly speaks to their talents as an artist.
Sonic details aside, glass beach’s non-musical influences are equally wide-ranging. James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake, Jenny Holzer’s textual art series Truisms and seminal Dadaist figurehead Tristan Tzara all play central roles on plastic death, and McClendon’s lyrics are often rife with allusions to cultural ephemera and cryptic musings. On “rare animal,” they namecheck D.B. Cooper and the hijacked Northwest Orient flight from 1971. Opening track “coelacanth” references the unattributed Whig treatise Vox Populi, Vox Dei. These are noticeably headier references than, say, Yoshi’s Island, but glass beach keep matters from getting overly academic by making each moment absurdly fun.
That playfulness assumes both musical and lyrical forms. Early highlight “slip under the door” flits between McClendon’s piercing shrieks and blissed-out grooves, flaunting the band’s aptitude for head-banging and head-swaying alike. It ends with a startling burst of blast beats before transitioning into “guitar song,” one of plastic death’s most tender offerings. This one-two punch is like stumbling upon a heavenly oasis after trekking through a harsh desert. “guitar song” even includes a sly, self-referential line about glass beach’s aversion to conventional song structures. “What we want will bore us / All verse-chorus / Green light red light,” McClendon sings over a dulcet finger-picked guitar. “motions,” the most straightforward tune on the record, takes an otherwise bleak rumination on rote existence and tragicomically compares it to a CAPTCHA test: “Select all images containing traffic lights / Select all images containing stop signs.”
Although many of these songs meander past the six- or seven-minute mark, it never feels like it. On the first glass beach album, McClendon found a canvas for their overflowing ambitions, and they continue that pattern on plastic death. As to be expected, there are odd time signatures galore that lend plastic death a mathy, proggy feel the same way that the first glass beach album did. But plastic death adopts an even more omnivorous approach than its predecessor. Thankfully, Glass Beach’s maximalist dalliances never feel cluttered, and that’s because McClendon’s sharp mixing injects all 13 tracks with boundless elan. There’s the punchy, pointed rhythms and jaunty hooks on “puppy.” There’s the swooning, Thom Yorke-indebted “the killer.” There are the off-beat guitar stabs dotting “motions.” There’s William White’s delirious drum breaks on “the CIA.” Paired with in-demand engineer Will Yip’s clean mastering, every instant of plastic death shines and pops.
On “rare animal,” McClendon reminds themselves to not get lost in a metaphor. Even with the album’s lengthy runtime, glass beach don’t lose themselves, period. The fact that plastic death never feels self-indulgent is something of a feat, with its habit of throwing everything at the wall, from genres to time signatures to lyrical motifs, to see what sticks. It’s not common when everything actually does. With plastic death, you can’t help but feel grateful that we finally have the second glass beach album.
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic in Kansas City. He writes the Best New Indie column at UPROXX. His work has also appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications.
