Venue: Oxford Art Factory
Available dates and ticket links:
WHEN YOU HEAR music like this the
wild, loose, and woozy drags of
guitar; the impossible beauty of it all-what
kind of landscape presents itself in your
mind? Vistas big enough to be forgotten in.
Deserts which stretch back to the begin-
ning of time. Infinite horizons melting into
pink bokehs. It's Texas, isn't it?
Formed in 2017 in Texas' Rio Grande
Valley, Glare aren't so much genre tradi-
tionalists as they are painters of wide
realms and intense moods. The four-piece
band has already accumulated a large au-
dience, both in the flesh with their reputa-
tion for sell-out shows, and on the internet,
a place where people go to short-circuit
feelings through their screens.
Sunset Funeral, the band's debut LP, is a
fog of dreamy grief, where feeling super-
sedes language. It's music, as guitarist Toni
Ordaz puts it, "for people who don't know
how to talk about how they feel." An album
that's been years in the making, Sunset Fu-
neral is a document of unspeakable grief,
charting the process of mourning and how
it travels through our subconscious and
dreams.
One of the great charms of Sunset Fu-
neral, and of Glare overall, is how they ap-
proach such a large, celestial sound with
humble materials. Among the shoegaze re-
vivalists, Glare come to the canvas with a
more resourceful, DiY perspective than
many of their peers. Glare's music is too
sublime, too huge to sound like it came
from any kind of manmade instrument, tiny
amp box or otherwise.
On first listen, Sunset Funeral-which
scans as vast as desert sandmay over-
whelm the senses. But look closer, and
you'll find a multiplicity of heavily crushed
textures, treasures. "Guts', with its sweetly
chugging guitar line, dissolves the borders
between bliss and despair. "2 Soon 2 Tell',
one of the album's most gauzily romanti...
Source: Ticketmaster.