Underneath The Autumn Star

A Sunny Day in Glasgow “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons”

By the time A Sunny Day In Glasgow arrived in the mid 2000s, shoegaze had become a nostalgic style tied to a particular time and place. There were still some shoegaze bands around, but they were mostly dismissed as derivative and inessential. A Sunny Day In Glasgow’s Ben Daniels approached the genre from a skewed angle – he embraced the possibilities of digital technology in shaping the sound of live instruments and vocals, and leaned into the nostalgia by making songs sound like vintage mid ’80s to early ’90s college rock played on warped cassettes. The music on their debut Scribble Mural Comic Journal plays on the tension between familiar and alien sounds, and has a collage-like approach to the juxtaposition of timbres and textures. The sound is always shifting, with some elements having a rough physicality, and others feeling more dazed and ethereal. These extremes overlap in the best songs, as in the instrumental refrains of “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons.”

Jack Parsons is one of the more fascinating characters in mid-20th century American history – a pioneering rocket scientist who was also an occultist and adherent of Aleister Crowley’s new religious movement Thelema. His life was, to put it mildly, completely bizarre. “A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons” imagines trying to have a dull conversation with the man – “no more of this Jack, for God’s sake, you’re not the devil” – and “concentrating on the mundane” as a sort of meditative practice. Or wait, is this more an act of self-nullification? It’s hard to say. I like the ambiguity.

Buy it from Amazon.