10 hours in a car is a long time indeed. 10 hours is a long time to spend in any form of vehicular transportation, in fact, but in a car especially so. I came back from Scotland today off the back of quite an exhausting field trip and my brain is a little addled as a result. Even so, I’m here at midnight lying in bed and listening to the soothing tones of Lovesliescrushing’s newest album, Glinter.

My past experiences with this musical outfit have been a bit dubious at the best of times; Xuvetyn and and Bloweyelashwish are not exactly my favourite albums in the world; while they do have a firm root in Shoegaze and Ambient, they also sadly share a great many sonic threads with Noise and Glitch and to me are insufferably grating at times as they combine the worst of both worlds. I suppose I have been fairly reluctant to step up to this latest LP (and their other new release Shiny Tiny Stars also) as a result; lucky I did really, since I wouldnt be feeling quite as peaceful as I am at this moment if it weren’t for this.

Glinter is a peculiar album; broken down into three ~20 minute tracks, each track seems to be defined by distinct phases, each of which has its own particular rhythms and sound, often somewhat discordant with the previous. These textural entities are separated mostly by expanses of silence, void spaces many seconds long. The music that returns as the quiet breaks is rather surprising, actually. “She Is Above The Clouds” tweaks oscillating vocal fragments in a vaguely minimal techno fashion for 20 minutes, something that I make sound unappealing but yet somehow just…works. The drone/ambient backing provides a panoramic vista of sound while the glitched out voices ride an invisible turbulence above the smooth expanse of cloud below.

“A Bird Flew Into The Sun” really combines the best of Shoegaze with Ambient; sickly sweet vocal coos buried beneath thick layers of fuzz, guitars manipulated to the point of destruction abstraction by pedals, rich drone sequences smothering the aforementioned textures; it’s an almost cold and emotionless experience but it has a certain richness and buoyancy in the sound that prevents its stagnation and it affects an air of soft neutrality to soothe tired ears as it gracefully ebbs and flows through troughs and climaxes.

“Broken Aureate Echo” again sits within the drone spectrum on things, slowly rising out of a bed of drone before incorporating mammoth, feedbacked guitars, all of which moves at a glacial pace. But this album conjures images of flying more than glaciers, like the sensation that we are in fact moving incredibly slowly over the tiny landmass below while in fact we are being driven inexorably forward at high speed.

Glinter is nice. It’s taken a little time and some tired processing to appreciate its intricacies but I think I understand this LP better than I did before. Don’t be fooled by the Shoegaze tag; the guitars here are certainly all encompassing but not obnoxious, falling away into the background as merely a soft haze of balmy noise that massages the eardrums. It’s huge, but in a faded and distal kind of way.

6.5/10