What would shoegaze sound like if it had its eyes on the sky? Over the course of several albums, the intercontinental six-piece A Sunny Day in Glasgow have been toying with an answer to that riddle. Their latest and best record, Sea When Absent, has an atmospheric, bleeding-watercolor quality that makes it sound a little bit like a My Bloody Valentine record if the moodiness and pensiveness were replaced with a feeling of almost violently explosive joy. Beneath dense textures, melodies pop like fireworks. Like their previous albums, Sea When Absent doesn't sound like much else out there; genre tags are only worth mentioning to show how they don't quite fit. It sometimes sounds like a psych record, made not by the kids smoking up behind the bleachers but the most devoted members of the glee club.
Since their freewheeling 2007 debut Scribble Mural Comic Journal, A Sunny Day in Glasgow have flown under the radar, apart from any discernible trends. Until now, their greatest achievement has been their criminally under-heard 2009 album Ashes Grammar, a panoramic collection of pastel-soft dream-pop that moved fluidly between ambient passages and hazy but immaculately structured pop songs like "Failure" and "Passionate Introverts (Dinosaurs)". Actually, "passionate introverts" is a pretty good way to describe at least one member of the band: the guitarist and ostensible leader Ben Daniels, a biostatistician who moved in 2009 from Philadelphia to Australia. "I am pretty antisocial," he said recently, when asked if he still felt connected to the Philadelphia scene. "I know that if I were in Philly I'd still mostly be hanging out in my apartment reading books and playing with synthesizers." That makes sense: Even in its most ambitiously full-screen moments, A Sunny Day in Glasgow's music has a certain bedroom-pop feel. Community often makes for great art, but music as unique and unclassifiable as ASDIG's usually springs from somebody shutting himself in his room and trusting his own weird way of seeing the world.
Ashes Grammar was a sprawling and occasionally drifting record, but Sea When Absent finds the band tightening up their sound just enough, bringing the interlocking vocals of their two singers, Jen Goma and Annie Fredrickson, to the forefront of the mix. For the first time, they've brought on an outside producer, Jeff Zeigler (War on Drugs, Kurt Vile), and though he's helped clarify their sound, that doesn't come at the expense of complexity. Each song on Sea When Absent structured like a maze: it's easy—and dizzying in the best way—to get lost in its twists and turns. "The Things They Do to Me" begins as weightless, space-rock reverie and then abruptly makes a hard left into a more pastoral earth-bound soundscape; "The Body, It Bends" pivots between an unassuming acoustic folk tune and a song that ought to have its own laser light show at a planetarium; a towering riff crashes down in the middle of "Boys Turn Into Girls (Initiation Rites)", sudden as a summer storm. These tonal shifts are so dynamic that they sound fresh on every listen; you could hear these songs 100 times and they'd still find ways to catch by surprise.
Music that overflows with so many ideas runs the risk of sounding cluttered, but Sea When Absent manages to avoid that pitfall. And that's pretty impressive, given the disjointed way it was recorded: The six members of the band (Daniels, Goma, Fredrickson, drummer Adam Herndon, bassist Ryan Newmyer, and multi-instrumentalist Josh Meakim) are now scattered across Australia, New York, and Philadelphia, and the album came together as they sent each other snippets of songs, with creative decisions made via lengthy group email chains. The result is an album structured in layers with many overlapping ideas, as fragmentary and luminous as light through a prism. The sweetly singsong-y "MTLOV (Minor Keys)" has the feel of a round, with Goma and Fredrickson's voices braided into rich harmonies. Then there's the stone-cold gorgeous "In Love With Useless (The Timeless Geometry in the Tradition of Passing)", which flirts with moments of dissonance and glitchiness (the pre-chorus sounds like nothing so much as a poorly connected Skype call) only to make the moments of sudden clarity feel that much more satisfying.
When A Sunny Day in Glasgow put out "In Love With Useless" as a single, they also released a lyric video for it—which is kind of funny, because they're not exactly a "lyrics band." Granted, they've pushed the vocals higher into the mix this time around, but it's usually next to impossible to understand what Goma and Fredrickson are singing. Not that it matters; ASDIG's music is more about the experience of getting blissfully lost in a feeling, and if their music were too literal or word-based it might take you out of that odd, dreamlike state.
"When Ashes Grammar came out," Daniels recently recalled, "I thought it was a really loud rock record for a year, and then a friend was like, 'This is really chilled-out and ambient.'" With Sea When Absent, A Sunny Day in Glasgow have finally made that loud rock record—full of crashing percussion and screaming guitars—but without abandoning the ambiance that makes them so distinct. Sea When Absent has the quality of one of those spectacularly bright summer days when they color in everything seems a little over-saturated, and it induces the same dizzy, woozy feeling you get after staring directly at the sun. Play it loud enough to see spots.
