Grumbling Fur — Glynnaestra
Grumbling Fur is the project of Daniel O'Sullivan, who is known for being a member of prog rock band Guapo as well as numerous other projects, as well as a shifting lineup of other collaborators. The line up has now expanded to include British psychedelic folk singer Alexander Tucker, which is a comfortable choice considering O'Sullivan appeared on Tucker's last couple of records already.
In an unexpected move, the sound of this new album "Glynnaestra" turns out to be primarily electronic, and rooted in a sort of dreamy, repetitive minimalist pop aesthetic inspired by the likes of Thom Yorke, without too much of Tucker's familiar fretwork. A look through O'Sullivan's discography shows that he has long preferred these sorts of timbres, using harmonium, organ, autoharp, guitar and more to create countless layers of orchestrated shimmer.
Each 4 minute track generally stays locked in a loop of one brief, pagan sounding chord progression made hazy and smoky by processing. Much like in the music of Radiohead and Thom Yorke, these harmonic clouds are delineated by rhythms composed of muffled clicks, pops, thumps, claps and rustic contact sounds that could be sourced from objects in the home. There is no attempt at making these propulsive or powerful: the album simmers at a lethargic energy level which works to its advantage, achieving a deep sense of the unreal, and placing the listener in a hypnotized state. A few of the spiral shaped synth lines found on the album would have been well suited to a high energy dance music context, but they never explore this direction on "Glynnaestra".
Many of the pieces are instrumental, but when vocal refrains appear, they have great dramatic effect. The vocal parts and melodies are often more simplistic than in Tucker's solo music, consisting in many cases of single repeated phrases difficult to decipher any meaning from on their own, such as "I saw you stand up and take 8 steps across the floor" (from "Protogenesis"). It's not a lyrically driven album, but in the greater context of the album, an attitude, if not quite a meaning, begins to take shape.
The true pop songs on the album "The Ballad of Roy Batty" and "Dancing Light" are guilty of utilizing 4 chord major key progressions we've all heard before, and attempts at an 80's-esque naivete in which the lyrics never seem to roll comfortably off Alexander Tucker's tongue (in his solo music or here). His voice remains beautiful and his harmonies carry the pieces, though it's hard to know why he thought it necessary to repeat tired lines like "I've seen things you people would not believe" or "I could do anything if I wanted to".
The weeping string textures on the title track "Glynnaestra" are saturated with intense, longing emotion, making this short piece a highlight. There's plenty of brainfood to be found as well in the percussion dominated "Alapana Blaze", which in its dry sparsitude serves as something of a palette cleanser. The 7 minute closer "His Moody Face" is a truly wonderful ending, an uncertain chord droning endlessly to the horizon, not unlike a hopeless thousand yard stare.
The ultimate strength of this album lies in the way it forms a perfectly cohesive, thought out experience with a lush, gothic beauty, bringing back the kind of melancholic, naive woodland melodies that fans of classic ethereal music on the 4AD label (or newer bands like Porcupine Tree or Type O Negative) have perhaps missed. It's nice to hear something embrace this aesthetic without falling into too much wallowing or cheesiness. Grumbling Fur has conjured a contemplative, lazy, brooding psychedelic universe that one cannot help but wish to return to. I think their best days are still ahead of them, and the duo are yet to write their most powerful, memorable songs together, but "Glynnaestra" is a fantastic mood record, a proud addition to the canon of Tucker and O'Sullivan. Even with its flaws, it's the most excited I've been about an album in a while