Glasvegas - 'Daddy's Gone'

We are, in this humble, dusty corner of the internet, resisters of hype. Press buzz deters us. The NME is a comic, and we mourn the days when you might be able to pick it up and take as much as half an hour to get from front to back. And most music blogs are - is there any other way of saying this? - shit. Vacuous look-at-mes who somehow think they're on the cusp of a career rush to break the latest, newest thing. Anything new is good. It's all fresh blood. Break it, be first, then move on for the next. It doesn't matter whether it's the 27th faint carbon copy of something which once might have had some life in it. Forgive me, I'm tired. But what very seldom comes across is a sense of the life-affirming joy music can bring, the adrenalin it can push through your sytem, the tears it can drag from your eyes.

So Glasvegas have been hyped to buggery. But you can only listen with your ears, and it turns out about half the LP is really good. You couldn't I suppose, hope for one that could be great all the way through. This, presently, is rare. It dips in the middle. But I don't mind. I've always been the lover of the single anyway. And one of those, 'Daddy's Gone', has made itself essential to my life at the moment. Of course it's histrionic and overstated, but I've always kind of liked a little bit of that. The lazy comparison of the music press is the Jesus and Mary Chain, which must be largely on the basis that they come from the same place. True, I can hear a shared love of Phil Spector, but for me the obvious comparison is the Mighty Wah!, for whom I've long nursed a soft spot. It has the same over-ambitious, slightly failed poetry in it, the same gutter-looking-in-the-stars thing, all working class regret and aspiration, choked throat early morning drunk dreams and bruised sentimentality.

Of course, they must never make another record.