07 February 2011

The Gloria Record - ep (1998, Crank)

After the split of Mineral, Christopher Simpson (vocals / guitar) and Jeremy Gomez (bass) had started a new project with other musicians and recorded this first ep, released in 1988. 

Two years later a second more sophisticated ep followed and finally an over-produced album that was hard to finish for them, in 2002, followed by a quick split.

I don't really like the later stuff of Gloria Record, except a few songs, but I was, and I guess I'm still am a fan of Mineral, and this ep is like a perfect minimal, quieter and slower version of "EndSerenading".

We have an half hour of splendid slow music, between pastoral shoegaze and warm, sensitive slowcore. There is something at the same time vaporous and dynamic in their music, a fluid tension, a bright radian melancholy. 

The songs seem not completetely finished, they are open windows, they share musical themes and develop themselves in the same lightly windy atmosphere. The whole ep is like a long summer drive towards the sea or through valleys and rivers. It there is a possible crossing between Appleseed Cast, the Red House Painters and the Early Day Miners, it's down here, yet Christopher Simpson's songwriting before it turned later in something too much traditional and middle of the road (with Zookeeper), had this unique capacity to capture some of these most ephemeral feelings of melancholic plenitude you meet once in your life between adolescence and adulthood.

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