Glutenhead – Queen City Sounds and Art

Glutenhead_NakedInToronto2_sm — Glutenhead, photo courtesy the artists

Glutenhead’s “Naked in Toronto” places the band’s music outside any obvious current context. Its creeping atmospheric opening section, the emotionally fragmented bluster of the second act, the off-kilter acoustic slacker playfulness of the third act and the dark psychedelic emo of the fourth act that brings together the song’s varied impulses perfectly makes you wonder who this music might be for while at the same time loving the way it takes you through an emotional gauntlet that expunges the deeply embedded angst and personal darkness and the amplifies the handful of joys that make everything somehow still worth holding onto. Its almost free verse poetry with lines like “I had a winterlong daydream of the summertime smokescreen” speaks so powerfully to how we can be fooled by our own hopes into assuming everything is going to be alright when often it won’t be, at least not in the ways we anticipate. The nearly screamed chorus of “I hate my life” and the line “I’m trying my best but it’s not working out” comes from that place many of us reach of abject desperation and despair after putting in so much effort into conducting our lives with honesty and integrity or at least in the ways we’ve been told are valid only to have life in a society often warped by values antithetical to normal human life and the cultivation of a sustainably good and rewarding existence, subsuming it in the interest of some cruel abstract like “the market” and “the economy” without examining what that might be and how those things might better serve us as a collective whole. At one point the song discusses not wanting to see friends die and being afraid of the prospect of one’s own death—heavy thoughts in a raw and real way in an era when such sentiments are given a few steps removed from it being a real and immediate concern. The song is simultaneously punk, indie pop in the vein picked up by the Bright Eyes in the earlier period of unvarnished emotionalism and brooding darkwave. It’s unlike much of anything you’ll hear this year and given how it so poetically and fiercely encapsulates the current mood of most of us at this moment makes the song particularly gripping and evocative. Listen to “Naked in Toronto” on Spotify and connect with Glutenhead at the links below.