Scotland is very good at producing glum rock bands. At the very cheeriest end are bands like the Fratellis, who have a vague sheen* of upbeat cheeriness but actually have no real substance to them anyway. Nothing they say means anything. In the middle of the scale are bands like Del Amitri who have a superficial sing-along niceness but are ultimately quite maudlin and have something of a victim complex.<\/p>\n
The other end of the scale – the very crowded end – is where the rest of the bands go. Idlewild and Ultravox and all that. Glasvegas are currently squatting at the darkest corner of that spectrum, frowning and grunting at passers-by.<\/p>\n
Glasvegas are really a modern-day Ultravox: pompous, pretentious, deeply miserable and with a very acute sense of their own importance. Their “wall of sound” (for which read, “big noisy tuneless background that is the same in every song”) gives every tuneless wail the same relentlessly funereal atmosphere of annoyance.<\/p>\n
The lead singer, with his bouffant hair (Morrissey circa 1989) and too-cool-for-this-shit attitude (Midge Ure circa all his life) makes him particularly ripe for binthood, and I recommend that he is the bintiest bint of this month, with other band members in a secondary bint status.<\/p>\n
In short: Glasvegas = major net loss.<\/p>\n
* Buff to sheen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Scotland is very good at producing glum rock bands. At the very cheeriest end are bands like the Fratellis, who have a vague sheen* of upbeat cheeriness but actually have no real substance to them anyway. Nothing they say means anything. In the middle of the scale are bands like Del Amitri who have a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chris","category-rants","category-silly-bint-of-the-month"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pouringbeans.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}