glass beach
plastic death
RUN FOR COVER
ABOVE THE CURRENT
Depending on who you ask, it’s been either four or five years since we last had a glass beach album. the first glass beach album arrived in May of 2019, but the band didn’t really get buzzy until Run for Cover reissued the record in January of the following year. Suffice it to say, it’s been a LFT (long fuckin’ time) since the emo-prog-hardcore-experimental-pop-jazz-etc.-etc. band dropped a full-length. On plastic death, the band makes up for this absence just about immediately, packing every idea imaginable into its 13 tracks. It’s a feat, a triumph, all of the words that bands would have printed on stickers to adorn their vinyl sleeves back when the music industry was alive and functioning.
Considering glass beach’s debut begins with “classic j dies and goes to hell part 1”—which basically sounded like Mr. Bungle covering “Mr. Brightside”—I expected the opener for plastic death to be equally ambitious and mind-bendingly outrageous. Ding, ding, ding, I’m the winner. “coelacanth,” named for a kind of fish that’s critically endangered (there are less than 500!), features rich layers of piano beneath “Classic J” McClendon’s voice. McClendon moves up and down the scale, tapping into a half falsetto, which gives the song an almost creepy foreboding. The guitars, bass, and drums slowly begin forming in an odd-meter rhythm, giving the song an instability before cracking snare hits introduce a swinging groove that alternates meters. It’s math rock adjacent, but by the time it reaches a hard-earned crescendo, it’s equal parts technically precise metal, post-rock, and chaos on the brink of untethering. It’s glorious.
Elsewhere, on “rare animal,” the band blends blues with quick hints of metal guitar licks, sounding unlike anything I’ve ever heard, though it could maybe be described as Maps & Atlases tackling Radiohead’s discography. Whereas the debut glass beach album was all power-pop choruses and group sing-alongs, plastic death is much more insular, nervy, and contemplative. It’s deeply nuanced, built around fissures and on top of fault lines. “puppy” begins as a crisp almost-funk song before the final chorus explodes with walls of guitar, shrieked vocals, and enough cymbal crashes to make Neil Peart smile from behind his great big kit in the sky. Of course, it ends with a pleasant major acoustic guitar chord and a sample of birds chirping. All things come and go. Time is a flat circle. True Detective is back.
It took glass beach a while to get to this place, but the wait was unequivocally worth it. McClendon sounds sharper than ever as both a songwriter and vocalist, and the band moves more freely yet more telepathically than on their debut. It’s hard to make precise, technically challenging music that still feels loose, improvisatory, and joyful. Even when the record invokes images of microplastics living inside our chests, whale carcasses, and trash islands so large they look like entire continents, there’s an underlying optimism, a relief, a deep sigh inside this record. glass beach makes music for communities—a celebration, a mourning, an acknowledgement of the mundanity. plastic death takes all of these feelings and transcribes them into a sound that’s tantalizing, a little scary, and wholly wondrous.
