By Tris McCall
From: Queens. Don’t believe the hype in the real-estate magazines -- it’s not the new anything. It’s just itself: an aggregate of neighborhoods north of Brooklyn, inadequately served by public transit and subject to blackouts. If you’re a rapper, the ‘Bridge isn’t over and never has been. Queens indie rockers, on the other hand, have never really had a regional identity. I imagine that when The Glaciers want to feel part of the “scene,” they take Metropolitan down to Williamsburg along with everybody else.
Format: Full-length; 12 tracks. In a year when everybody has been recording iPod-busting 10-minute epics to prove they’re Down With The Album Concept, closer “Hats Off” seems almost modest at 6:28.
Fidelity: This isn’t going to mean anything to 99 percent of you, but the other 1 percent will know exactly what The Moonlight Never Misses An Appointment sounds like when I mention that four of the 12 tracks were co-produced by Christopher Ziter of the Essex Green.
It must have been a hell of a session: Ziter got to work on the best songs on the album, and The Glaciers rounded up a pianist, a kick-ass slide guitar player, and a full string section. The four collaboratively-produced tracks here don’t sound quite as pristine as the songs from the Essex Green’s Cannibal Sea, but maybe that’s a good thing.
The other eight songs on The Moonlight Never Misses An Appointment appear to have been home-recorded by the two main Glaciers, guitarist Ian Stynes and singer Jackie Linge. Props to them, and maybe to the masterer, too, because the basement stuff doesn’t sound all that different from the big productions they did with Ziter. Stynes, who plays drums on everything and much of the bass too, probably tracked basics at his place in Queens and then took the tapes (this is all analog, and it really sounds that way) from stop to stop, adding friendly overdubs where he could. But nothing on The Moonlight Never Misses An Appointment feels piecemeal.
Genre: The other association I ought to mention here is the Mendoza Line. Stynes and Linge both played with that act, as did Bob Hoffnar, who adds his pedal steel to about half of the songs on The Moonlight Never Misses An Appointment. But the Glaciers are neither as Dylanesque nor as rootsy as the Mendoza Line are, or were, and though most of their songs are set in the countryside and they use some trad-folk acoustic instruments like the trumpet and that thar pianner, they’ve got some twee-pop in their souls. If you thought that the Essex Green was the halfway point between Belle & Sebastian and pastoral Americana, well, they are, but The Glaciers prove there’s more than one way from point A to point B. Let’s just call it folk-rock, or alt-country-fried-chamber-pop, and move on to ...
Arrangements: Drums, bass, and scrappy acoustic guitar on almost everything, tasteful rhythm electric, and piano bouncing away in the midrange. Cellist Linnea Weiss appears on eight tracks, including the four where she takes the lead chair in the string quartet. Her charts for the fiddlers are classically-inspired, especially her stately intro to “Hats Off.” Nate Wooley, who The Glaciers’ Web site claims is a veteran of Mr. Bungle(?!), splashes some brass here and there, but resists the urge to show off. During quiet moments together, Stynes and Linge show you that, yes, they do own synthesizers, but they don’t do much with them here besides letting them warble a little in the background.
It’s the slide-players who get pride of place on The Moonlight Never Misses An Appointment: most of the solos fall to the pedal steel guys to execute. Hoffnar plays on the basement tapes, but it's Gerald Menke (ex-Mercury Rev) who steals the spotlight on the big productions. On the upbeat numbers, the musicians all hoe themselves down at once; there’s percussion, handclaps, and Linge is joined by ‘verbed-out choruses of backing vocalists. But a comparably representative arrangement might be “Calling It Quits” -- an organ drone, slide guitar, diffuse bass, and watercolor trumpet, all smeared together and dew-bleary, like the world seen through wet eyelashes.
What's this record about? “World On Fire” is almost certainly an anti-war song, and it’s sung from the perspective of a rueful and powerless observer; you know, kinda like Joni Mitchell on the first verse of “California.” If you’ve heard the Mendoza Line albums before, you probably think you know where this is going: 12 tracks of highly poetic criticism of the Bush administration and American adventurism abroad. But even minus the polemics, most of The Glaciers’ concerns are present here: Linge worries that the world has lost its mind, even as she carefully counts the cost of progress. The image of the sleepwalker makes its first appearance on this track, but a funny thing happens on the way to the political moral -- she sings “waking up can be much sweeter than a dream,” and it becomes clear that she’s not talking about consciousness-raising at all.
Linge and The Glaciers are after something far more metaphysical: getting in touch with the essence of a planet that’s swaying under the weight of entropy. Wake up, look out your window, and take it in, Linge seems to be warning us, because it’ll never be the same as it is right now.
On “Old Buildings,” The Glaciers lay out a sad and plainspoken tribute to abandoned factories; “no one understands how they used to be important,” frets Linge. But pure preservationists they ain’t -- these factories “get what they deserve in the end;” in other words, if you want to bathe in the aesthetic splendor of the city, you’d better open yourself up to it while it’s still standing.
Every corner of The Moonlight Never Misses An Appointment shimmers with the anticipation of inevitable change and decay. Trouble haunts all of the love lyrics; there’s a fear of wasting time and lives, changing hearts and false promises. It all comes together on “Railroad,” the collection’s best song: the unraveling of rail towns becomes a metaphor for social change, and the fragility of relationships, violence, recklessness, getting ditched, left behind. The Moonlight Never Misses An Appointment is a portrait of the country in a centrifuge; its still, pastoral surface quietly wracked by forces that its inhabitants are powerless to control. New cities, wild animals on the highways, symptoms that don’t make sense, unpersuasive reassurances -- a tapestry coming apart at its edges.
The singer: It may take you a few listens to warm up to Jackie Linge. Her voice sometimes trails off or breaks outright, and she’s got a bad habit of throwing away some of her most important lyrics. When she doesn’t have to worry about competing with the drum kit, she slips into a fragile and conversational delivery: “Fleeing Away” and “Calling It Quits,” in particular, are moving in their breakfast-nook intimacy. But when The Glaciers decide to turn up and rock, Linge gets left in the dust -- on “Lucky Me,” she chases after the band as best as she can, and on “Mono Highway,” she tries to get hairy and scary, which is just a mistake.
Oddly, her best performances are on the four Ziter co-productions: her singing there is so note-perfect, firm, and communicative that the songs sound like they were delivered by a different frontwoman, or by a dormant version of Linge. As I said before, that must have been some magical session. Stynes remains silent for the set, except on “Kidney Stone,” the one track he wrote by himself. There, his throaty whisper joins Linge throughout. It’s something they ought to do more often.
The musicians: Hoffnar is no slouch on the pedal steel, but Gerald Menke takes a few leads -- especially his second tear through “Railroad” -- that slash a crop-circle through my synapses. The Moonlight Never Misses An Appointment isn’t really about showcasing virtuoso performances, but when the band clears room for Menke to do his thing, the earth stands still for a few bars. Damp reverb smothers the fire and it’s right back to the storytelling.
The songs: About half of these songs are adagios: unlike some folk-rock bands, The Glaciers don’t attempt to mask the simplicity of their compositions by blowing through the changes at a billion miles per hour. “Old Buildings” tethers a straightforward melody to a steady chord cycle; “Habit To Break” and “Hats Off” drop bass notes down the piano keyboard before proceeding to their releases. Choruses are generally ambiguous phrases, sung over and over: “to be one,” or “I thought you were / my savior.” In short, if you remember how R.E.M. built their songs before they signed with Warner Brothers, you’ll have a good idea of the way that The Glaciers write. Take a Reckoning folk-rock number and cut the tempo by 40 BPM, and you’re right in the neighborhood.
What differentiates this record from others like it? Well, what are glaciers like? They’re made of ice, sure; but it’s moving ice, sliding slowly and gracefully (“as graceful as a glacier,” Linus van Pelt once said) into the ocean. Also, glaciers are endangered; they’re big receding symbols of the perils of climate change. Glaciers are the ice caps we’re throwing away as we give the forces of global deterioration a helping hand.
Now, Jesse Sykes and The Sweet Hereafter’s excellent Oh My Girl was called ice-country by some publications; I think I remember some journalist referring to that album as a “sonic glacier.” As far as I know, The Moonlight Never Misses An Appointment hasn’t been compared to Oh My Girl, but they’re similar records. (Only this one has got better songs, with way better lyrics.) The Glaciers don’t have an instrumentalist in the band as good as Phil Wandscher from The Sweet Hereafter, but nor does anybody else. If Wandscher and Sykes constructed an ice castle that felt eternal, Linge and Stynes remind us that everything frozen eventually melts.
Likewise, if The Moonlight Never Misses An Appointment hasn’t been compared to albums by The Cowboy Junkies, that’s just because folks have short memories. Margo Timmins isn’t fronting this act, but The Glaciers’ writing is fuller, smarter, and more evocative than Michael Timmins’ ever was. So if “ice country” is a style (and why not?), this is the genre-defining album precisely because it isn’t frozen solid. It’s a cycle about the forces that erode the stillness, and the steady dripping away of everything that seems monumental. In other words, when a band called The Glaciers begins its debut album with a song called “World On Fire,” you can be pretty sure they’ve got an eye on their own undoing, and that some of that destabilization is going to get inscribed in the music.
What's not so good? “Mono Highway,” the only track that doesn’t really work. Instead of easing into the disturbing narrative, as she does elsewhere, Linge grits up her voice and shouts the chorus at the listener. I’m all for change-ups, but this one goes hard against The Glaciers’ strengths. That it doesn’t shatter the spell is testament to how coherent the rest of the album is.
Recommended? I don’t know if the Marlborough Farms fanatics have picked up on this one yet, but it’s probably the best album to have come from that camp since The Albemarle Sound. Actually, it might be even better, because it manages to sound apocalyptic (check out “Hats Off” in particular) with a minimum of fuss. I’ve tried to cooperate by writing a review that goes easy on the hyperbole, but I’m pretty comfortable calling The Moonlight Never Misses An Appointment a highlight of 2006. Linge may throw you a bit at first, but she’s a compelling no-bullshit writer with a singular perspective that only deepens upon protracted exposure to it. The Moonlight Never Misses An Appointment is the sort of album that you can listen to every day and never get tired of -- and I speak from experience, since I’ve listened to it every day since the middle of July.
Where can I get a copy/hear more? The Moonlight Never Misses An Appointment is out on Eskimo Kiss Records, an imprint out of HotLanta. The Game tells me that when he turns on the TV, all he sees is the “A,” but this isn’t what he’s talking about; even in indie rock, these guys aren’t big hitters. Give them a hand and buy your copy through the label website.
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