Marking their fourth overall studio album, Glass Animals’ I Love You So F****ing Much creates a new outer space theme for the UK artists to inhabit after their successful 2020 release Dreamland.
Available on July 19, 2024 through Republic Records, the new release is chock full of reverberating synth and powerful chord progressions, but what do Glass Animals do right with this spacey album? In a sentence, Glass Animals’ I Love You So F***ing Much is repetitive unpolished lyricism in an exciting, yet shallow new world. Consisting of ten songs in total, the sound of this album is full of hope, it is searching for something to land on, a monument to base its purpose around, but sadly it is never fully found. Each track is another chapter of cosmic exploration. This can be fun and exciting of course, however, what Glass Animals fail to do is show why this journey is unique. This results in a lot of repeated sounds and melodies.
Many of the songs feel like they lack a special identity, and in the great expanse of space, everything quickly begins to sound the same. Not in an eerie, inescapable way, but more a weak-production-single-sound-pack-download sort of way. What is right was their selection for the first pre-release, “Creatures in Heaven,“ which brought a lot of hope for the rest of the album. It is a strong track that features good songwriting with lyrics and rhymes that feel special, working to push it into a unique headspace. In enough words, it talks about sex and longing, but it’s not nasty like it could be, and there is some credit where it’s due for that. The soundscape is powerful as it slowly builds into the drop at the chorus.
This in mind, nine more songs like this and the album would be wonderful, right? Wrong… because the special parts of this cut seem to repeat themselves over and over through the rest of the album, leaving the unique power feeling contrived and overused. Each song has its own way of maneuvering the same sonic technique; that is the slow build into a powerful beat drop at the chorus. It is fun for those that have decent lyrics, but weak and distracting in the ones where the intentionally unclear lyrics are overpowering (this arguably is the case with “White Roses“). In truth, the album seems like rotating theme songs for some type of cheap 2010’s space anime that only hopes of grabbing the residual viewers of Cowboy Bebop. Of course, this is making a comparison where it is not needed, but the fact is that these feel like background tracks to drifting in space.
Regardless of journey or emotion, each track creates this same mental image of the lone spaceship taking off to once again wander the stars. This stated, there are powerful moments that deserve their time to shine; like the unique crescendos in “Creatures in Heaven” and “How I Learned to Love the Bomb.“ Lumped in with the rest though, they start to quickly sound like shuffles on a Avicii, Marshmello, OneRepublic feel-good playlist. Returning to “Creatures in Heaven,” it has an engrossing chorus and soundscape of space sounds that build on each other in a way that others like “A Tear in Space” try to replicate, but misses the mark.
On the other hand, “How I Learned to Love the Bomb” is a song on subversion. The electric guitar lead music builds up until the catchy slant rhyme of “and you’re just two sided/ so goddamn indecisive”/ oh and it’s deep inside you.” These lines are not met with crashing synth and intense exploding beats, but instead a steady chord progression that subtracts itself from the rest of the tune. It is one of the parts of this album that feels different and embodies the strange worlds the Glass Animals should be known for. Another interesting part of the album is at the end of the second song, “Whatthehellishappening?,“ where the music cuts itself off a few seconds before the next comes on. This is a fun way to introduce emptiness; even if it is extremely simple and almost redeems the song that seems to endlessly build into a release about how true love is pretty but rough. What is special about this one is the risk taken at the end. It attempts to show you the truth about the emptiness in space.
If there were more interludes and silences, more proof of the actual expanse of space, then maybe I Love You So F***ing Much could be the epic space explorer’s novella that it is trying so hard to emulate. Nonetheless, Cryptic Rock gives the album 2.5 out of 5 stars.
){kind=link}
No comment