There’s Always Glimmer is the debut album from Chicago-based artist Gia Margaret. The latest addition to what is fast becoming an embarrassment of riches, Margaret joins the likes of Dear Nora, Lisa/Liza, Friendship and Karima Walker on the Orindal Records roster, and the record fits perfectly into the evocative and distinctive catalogue.
Gia Margaret makes music that exists in a strange dreamlike world that looks a lot like our own, what the label describe as “a blend of loner folk, bedroom pop, shoegaze & ambient electronic.” While the album sounds ethereal and otherworldly, its themes and emotions are rooted in something very real. This is not escapism into some dreamy, floaty fantasy land, but an attempt to capture the equally beguiling, and sometimes fleeting, relationships between friends, family and everyone else. Margaret’s lyrics are devoid of melodrama, often describing everyday events that at first glance might seem unremarkable, though her unique focus elevates them to something near transcendental, illuminating our lives from within and casting light on the sad magic of existence.
The result feels somehow both cautious and decisive, sleepy and sincere, all wrapped up in a silvery sentimentality that’s hard to ignore. This is typified by opener ‘Groceries’, its gently woozy keys and Margaret’s slow and sombre vocals possessing a near sedated feel. “It’s safe to say it’s been a hard year,” she sings, as if to set the scene for what’s to come, though this sluggish sadness is shot through with a steely-eyed hope.
“Though it’s not easy to see
there’s always glimmer
you bought the groceries
and you let the light in”
The album’s lead single, ‘Birthday’ pairs electric guitar with a captivating synth-led backdrop, the percussion picking things up slightly from the opener. It’s a song about loss and absence, of full minds and empty spaces, a thousand small and seemingly mundane associations changed forever as two people move apart. “Wouldn’t it be so strange,” Margaret asks during the chorus, “not to be with you on your birthday?” The track forms the perfect example of the record’s ability to impart deep meaning from shallow things, simple words and observations used to imply whole histories, tone and cadence imagining futures, or no future at all.
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‘Figures’ is built on disarmingly simple strummed acoustic guitar and a sense of heavy-hearted reminiscence. But it somehow feels light and airy too, small tendrils of the titular glimmer snaking in at the edges, a sense that things are finally moving on. Still, however, recognition flickers on the periphery, even if disproved in the next moment. “The lights are on in the buildings downtown,” Margaret sings in the opening line, “and the figure inside moves like you.”
‘Smoke’ is a sombre piano track, Margaret whispering her lines as if revealing long-known truths and swallowed emotion (“I’ll never tell you I cried in the bathroom/ The first night we moved in/ And you went out to smoke,”), while ‘In Normal Ways’ sounds like a stripped-back Grouper song, distorted double-vision guitar and relative lyrical clarity, as if someone has dredged Liz Harris’s vocals from the bottom of a lake and set them to dry in the weak shoreline sun.
“Your hands are on my shoulder
keep me from going overboard
although I felt alive when you were carving out the snow
for my feet”
The tracks ‘Looking and ‘Sugar’ are perhaps the closest thing to conventional folk songs on the record, wire-thin acoustic guitar gently ticking behind Margaret’s vocals, while ‘For Flora’ is a song rooted in the past, the piano’s tempo something like the rhythm of time, the answering machine voices burbling behind like spectral glitches in the constant motion. ‘Exist’ plays like an affectionate dream, all edges dulled into tactile grace, and ‘Wayne’ maintains the atmosphere while the vocals take on a quality somewhere near yearning, before closer ‘West’ emerges from beneath a tape hiss fog. The track is as soporific as anything on the record, though Margaret’s vocals tick into small rhythms and harmonies, as though shaking free from the somnolence, or perhaps just the opposite, attempting to mimic its currents in the hope of being carried off.
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The palette of Gia Margaret is built from shades of sadness—loss, regret, wistful longing, the arresting trap of nostalgia and plain old hurt—though again and again Margaret provides a counter-shade, as though the darkness’ true purpose is merely to highlight the warm, weak glow within. Because, while people up and leave, and time is certainly no kinder, Gia Margaret is here to prove that value is inherent in life itself, meaning and fulfilment not in spite of troubles, but within them. No matter how dark, there is always glimmer.
There’s Always Glimmer is out now on Orindal Records. Get it from their website on black of coke bottle green LP, or as a digital download from the Orindal Bandcamp page.
