CONCERT REVIEW: A Sunny Day in Glasgow @ Kung Fu Necktie, 4/1

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CONCERT REVIEW: A Sunny Day in Glasgow @ Kung Fu Necktie, 4/1

POSTED: Friday, April 2, 2010, 9:00 PM

Filed Under: Music | Concert Review Philly Bands

A Sunny Day in Glasgow was one of the first bands I ever booked in college. I didn't really know the city yet, but hearing Scribble Mural Comic Journal, the band's debut album, gave me reason enough. Their combination of gorgeous ambient textures and beautifully dissonant harmonies didn't really sound like anything else I'd heard. Best of all — they were from here! The band I saw at Kung Fu Necktie last night is still called A Sunny Day in Glasgow and they're still from Philly, but that's nearly where the similarities end. The Homophones played first, were the perfect opening band: fun, irreverent, engaging and altogether uninterested in the seriousness that a band usually needs to get really famous or whatever. They didn't seem serious, but they sure took their irreverence seriously. They danced a lot and popped balloons and even sang a song about David Foster Wallace. Arc in Round, who played second, sounded very little like the Disco Inferno song after which they presumably dubbed themselves last year. They've got a beautiful web presence — lots of vibrant colors and patterns — which makes me think shoegaze and ambient, but on stage, they actually sounded a bit proggy. I kept thinking about Tool, possibly because of frontman Jeff Zeigler's shaved head, but also because the band does have a little bit of prog metal in them. Then it was time for Sunny. At this point lead songwriter Ben Daniels is the band's only "original member." It's a testament to Daniels' considerable abilities as a bandleader that with all the lineup changes, the band's overall aesthetic isn't really all that different. The singing might be most impressive. New vocalists Annie Fredrickson and Jen Goma stay true to the band's earlier vocal sound, which, after all, is what made their music stand out in the first place. They've mellowed a bit — their new songs are lighter, more upbeat, maybe more digestible, without abandoning that ever present dissonance (is there any other band with harmonies like these?). It's a welcome development: staying true to their roots even as they get closer and closer to writing that perfect, three-minute pop song — a direction I never even realized the band might take. There were a few songs last night that sounded surprisingly close to power pop. Were they new songs? Were they songs from their second album Ashes Grammar or their recent Nitetime Rainbows EP sped up so much that I couldn't recognize them? I'm not sure, but they sounded fantastic. And, how about one last difference? The new singers dance more.

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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