Glass Rock

I recorded and mixed this album when my band fell in love with another band. The press release from the time tells the story:

Glass Rock is a song, is a band, is a way of life. Glass Rock is the crystallized movement formed by the molten lava makeout of the two bands of the album title: ‘Tall Firs meet Soft Location.’ It’s a werewolf and a rhino on a first-date rampage of Korean Food and poppers, doing the Cabbage Patch on the boardwalk, kissing babies with beer breath, all with truthful love in their hearts.

The core elements of the Soft Location sound are Kathy Leisen’s haunting voice and boneyard guitar, and Matt Kantor’s slo-mo jet fuel bass jamminating. Add Tall Firs: Ryan Sawyer’s could-blow-your-pants-off-but-prefer-to-slowly-work-them-over-your-hips drumming and Dave Mies and Aaron Mullan’s creamy dual-savant guitar stylings: two dudes who don’t even know how the other guy’s guitar is tuned but nonetheless have brought the tandem knockout reverb dropkick since 1991. The two bands have barely met- this record was arranged, recorded, and mixed in two three-day sessions. The band actively refuses to discuss influences, even with one another. With two pairs of childhood friends in the band, the music just happens and the listener is left to speculate. The dilettante thinks Chan Marshall or an Astral Weeks-era Van Morrison caught an extra-rad time machine ride and now inhabits every moment from 1955-2013 simultaneously. The serious aficionado is thinking Martha Reeves, Amon Dull II, the Gories, Otis Redding. But Heads know: This thing is wigs, Pepsi commercials, Sam Cooke, hardcore festivals, and free stuff on craigslist.

In reality, Glass Rock are a prisonyard football team: a motley collection of wizened lifers, small-time pimps, and the wrongly convicted. Leisen is their Burt Reynolds. A painter on the Outside, she woke up back in the huskau of a recording studio after Awesome Michael ratted her and Kantor out to Ecstatic Peace. In the yard Tall Firs were hanging around bench-pressing twice their body weight. This record documents their crushing and dramatic defeat of the prison guards, and their harrowing escape during the ensuing melee.

There is nothing contrived about this band. Neither derivative nor hybridized, GnR II are truly Chimeric. This ain’t reference-rock. This is the half man/half shark/half alligator sung of in days of yore, with inflatable Sasquatch feet and one popsicle arm. This thing will get bestial with you on the dancefloor, and will hold you tight on a pre-dawn canoe ride; staring at the stars crying at the wonder and terror of it all.

Glass Rock ‘Tall Firs meet Soft Location’ is available from Ecstatic Peace! via LP and download. Recommended for people who wanna get laid.

Of Soft Location: “Posthumous tracks of beautiful light pop-psych from this Detroit outfit, fronted by one Kathy Leisen, who also wrote these songs. Her voice is a major attraction here... Ethereal, light touches of synth, reverb, and a full-round bass tone guide these eight selections to the center of the heart; warm, gentle, non-combative yet stimulating motions of late night ghost trail songs are what transpires. Think Dadamah, Happy Nightmare Baby, perhaps early Sugarcubes or Unrest circa Imperial FFRR... Aces; hope they reconvene soon, or Leisen finds another outlet for her songs, as this is too good to miss. Total out-of-nowhere surprise.” –Dusted Magazine

Of Tall Firs: “[T]racks like ‘So Messed Up’ and ‘Secrets and Lies’ melt out of the speakers like warm...honey, and the band still gel when the tempo is raised, as on the motorik droner ‘Hairdo’. There are no elements of ‘Too Old to Die Young’ that haven’t been used before by any number of New York bands, from Patti Smith to Television to Talking Heads, but the way Tall Firs blend them results in something lusher than any of the others could muster.” -NME