Of course, it goes without saying that Gleaming is great. The songs sound submerged in a smoky twilight, a downbeat late-night vibe that’s sometimes unsettling and always intimate and claustrophobic. The slightly stormy guitar of opener ‘Harbor’ is joined by Mark’s mumbly, weary vocals, thick with a sleepy dullness, as if he’s answering a phone call at 5 in the morning. The same can be said of the vocals on ‘This Place Wears Me Out’, which take centre stage in a narcotic daze beside minimal buzzing atmospherics and gentle percussion, setting the tone for what is a strange sleep-slurred record.

The same lethargic despondency continues across the album, such as on the strange baritone folk song ‘Clissold Park 6am’, and ‘Diet Coke’, with its percussion like the onset of some derelict ghost train clattering over tracks long since removed. The vocals on ‘Neon’ play out almost in slow motion, transforming what would be a standard acoustic bedroom pop song into something isolated and tortured and unsettling. “In my head there’s theme park sounds,” he sings, “me (OR meat?) on rides, divorcee’s smiles / still my sleep melts my brain”. ‘Junk Food’ has a similar morose air, the atmosphere one of stale and stifling reclusiveness, while closer ‘Hollow Ponds’ sounds like a sinister take on the sound of acts such as Ricky Eat Acid or Arrange, bummed-out electronic pop music for quiet lonely bedrooms.

Imagine finding yourself in an empty dive bar at night, or a run-down bus station, only to find a voice emanating from a particularly gloomy corner. Its words are peculiar, eccentric perhaps, and lonely to a degree that suggests great familiarity with the emotion. Now imagine this figure is singing to you and you alone. Sleep-deprived and buzzed by boredom, you are unsure if it’s all in your head. You are imagining Lake Michigan’s Gleaming.

The post Album Première : Lake Michigan – Gleaming appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The album opens with ‘Party’, an eerie introduction to the slow, dark aesthetic of Lake Michigan, mixing a dreamy dissociation with the cutting awareness of said isolation, leading to something that is sad and apologetic in equal measure. This continues into ‘Snow’, where Marks channels Malcolm Middleton in that I’m-so-miserable-even-my-surroundings-are-after-me sort of attitude, where the border between laughing and crying seems incredibly small and pretty insignificant.

“I’m watching falling foliage, it dances between stone slabs.
The suburbs are screwing me and I want out.
I’m picturing you walking in, it makes me feel chill, inebriated.
I’m trying to remember if it was you I saw when my eyes closed”

‘Sober’ deals with the peaks and troughs of loving (“The thing about being alone and not in love is that it makes you feel sober… But when you start feeling it again, you are intoxicated. Blissfully stupidly ignorantly uninformed, yet smiling”), while ‘Real (Ad Breaks Pt. 2)’ runs with the idea of the passage of time and reality getting in the way of good times. Just as we described in our Free Cake for Every Creature write-up, post-collegiate blues can hit hard, and anyone who has left university will relate to Marks’ writing here:

“Guess who’s just another cross on the road maps, a place to get to via train.
The hours ran out and so did the days. I stopped trying to try.
We’ll never talk shit on my front step again,
we’ll never grace that beer garden again.
I wish that we could go back to that mismatched old room,
but people messed up and the rest of us grew up.
Now all that’s left is to keep on walking,
the breaks are now over
and real life has hit.”

The EP is out now on Wolf Town DIY and Ruined Smile Records, or you can buy it from the Lake Michigan Bandcamp page.

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