Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 08/09/08
Label: Columbia Records

There are reasons to approach Glasvegas cynically, if you're so inclined. The way professional hyperventilators Alan McGee and the NME leapt all over them on the basis of one single. How their CD sleeve lavishly thanks the PRs, marketeers, record companies, journalists, bigwigs and agents behind their sudden rise. The band's tired notions of rock'n'roll cool, all soft leather, sunglasses and scowls.

But then you listen to these songs and all of that floats away like the fluff it is. From the shimmering opening of "Flowers And Football Tops" to the sighing close of "Ice Cream Van", Glasvegas sound like a band you've always needed in your life, though you really didn't know it. It's not that they're the first band to fuse girl group melodies with Velvet Underground guitar rumbling, nor that James Allan is the first man to sing about his own world in his own accent. But they're surely the first to do both with this grace, empathy and profound beauty.

Just listen to the way the crystalline guitar line of "Geraldine" lifts aloft the social worker of the title, that most unfair butt of Daily Mail scorn. Or how the radiant "Daddy's Gone" seems to place a tender arm around the shoulders of those defiant, damaged, fatherless boys the rest of us see on our street corners but prefer to ignore. Or the sincerity with which "Ice Cream Van" grieves for "Glory days…pure community", those very bonds the Conservatives helped unravel and now weep crocodile tears for.

All of which would be as grey and oppressive as watching ten Ken Loach films back to back, were it not for the glorious tunes the words come wrapped in. So though "Flowers And Football Tops" is about a mother's near unbearable heartache - based on the actual murder of Glaswegian 15-year-old Kriss Donald - its harmonies soar so high that its sheer humanity becomes uplifting. Even the curdled, drunken self-disgust of "It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry" is transformed into something life-affirming by its surging guitars and enormous, impassioned Allan vocal.

It's not a perfect record. The continual striving for the epically meaningful can leave "Glasvegas" feeling a little one note, almost as monochrome as its artwork. And "Stabbed" - which sees Allan deliver a drab, croaking monologue over Beethoven's "Midnight Sonata" - sounds gimmicky, the one thing a band this stylised can't afford to be. But it's a gut punch of a debut, and one that makes you believe Glasvegas are one of those rare, rare bands who might just have that perfect record in them.

    by Jaime Gill