Glass Animals - Dreamland

Anybody heard of Glass Animals? Me neither, but it was this or the new Florence + The Machine album, and the only thing i like less than double albums is double albums with only 3 sides. Cloudkicker gets a pass, but nobody else. 

I paid how much for this? It better buy me some dry clean only clothes from the thrift shop and take then to get dry cleaned before handing them to me. I don't even want to try to guess what it is. Let's just be confused in real time. I've taken the liberty of not even looking it up, so whether you believe me or not, this is the real deal: What The Hell Are We Listening To, Bottle Tries To Guess. 

White on pinkish lyric sheet, you're just trying to strain my old man eyes. Which side is A? Nothing, alright let me hold it up to the light so i can get a glare on the runout. Oh, ok, hand in front of face is Side B, no hand is Side A. It's like those hipster bathrooms with spurs on one door and a bicycle on the other. 

Whaaa? Is this just the intro, or did i just buy a vapor wave album? Alright, they weren't lying, they said "as focused as Mr. Miyagi." 

Ok, we're 3 tracks in and this sounds exactly like what Maroon 5 unfortunately turned into, but through a post-ironic filter. Did Tim & Eric produce this? 

Space Ghost Coast To Coast is literally the bridge from Macklemore's Thrift Shop expanded into a full song. I did not know that in my introductory paragraphs, and yes the coincidence terrifying. 

Denzel Curry? Ok, that makes sense, i mean the foundation is Hip-Hop. It's bizarre, but it is recognizable modern psychedelic Hip-Hop. Who the hell are these guys and what the hell am i listening to? This is weird. No, like really weird. There's a sort of 21 Pilots meets Maroon 5 vibe going on, and i absolutely don't get it. I think i like it, but i'm not entirely sure i'm supposed to, you know? It's not vapor wave, but it's every bit as confusing as vapor wave. 

"You taste like surfing videos." To borrow their own follow-up rhetorical question "What the hell are we doing now?" 

I do not know what the hell this is, but it might be best described as Baz Luhrmann's Hip-Hop Nostalgia Tour, 1990. I could kind of see imagining this was what you think the 90s were like if you were born in 2002. You'd be 20 now and all you'd really have is Gangsta Rap giving Tony Hawk a hug at the grand opening of an Abercrombie and Fitch back when malls were a place people actually wanted to go shopping. Has anyone under 30 even seen Mallrats or Hackers or Empire Records? Those are straight up the 90s i actually remember. Not nostalgia, that's what life actually felt like at the time. 

Is this how it feels to have Gen X, rather than Baby Boomer, parents for a lot of people? I'm asking here, i might be the youngest Gen X-er on the planet, but i'm out in the deep end without any kind of flotation device (let alone one shaped like a gummy bear) here. And, like, why specifically Karate Kid II? That is a bizarre choice of intentional reference. Is it the grudge against Mr. Miyagi that matters, or is it just the fact that Daniel got to visit Okinawa and fail at breaking ice blocks? If it's just America + Karate, why not Best of the Best? Way better movie. Pat Morita's great and all, but James Earl Jones and Sean Penn's brother (hey Putin, is Chris Penn still allowed to visit Russia?), and Eric Roberts. Eric freakin' Roberts, he played the Master in the TV Movie between the old English run and the new Canadian run of Dr. Who. If you're not nostalgizing Eric Roberts in your 80s/90s vapor-hop confuse the hell out of Bottle-athon, then i just don't even know what planet you were living on as a child. 

This album is a bizarre alien synopsis of the concept of post-ironic nostalgia that was probably good enough to pass Alien High-School, Captain of the Space Football Team Edition, but this band can't possibly be from this time period of this country, can it? These have to be 19 year olds from somewhere an ocean away from here. "Made in Canada" doesn't mean anything, all the Target fake exclusive color variants are made at a Canadian pressing plant. This is Europe, it has to be. These guys are like Cage The Elephant but younger, maybe a couple American kids whose parents moved to England and only took VHS copies of the crappy movies from the 80s with them. 

The longer i hold it in my head, the more convinced i get. One of these guys is "the American" regaling his school chums with stories of Dr. Dre, and "surfing," and "people sprinkle in swear words when they want to emphasize something, not because they're really angry." He's not WRONG wrong, these are the appropriately labeled legos, but hippos don't have giraffe necks and they aren't actually purple. I'm not even joking, one of these kids, without a doubt, was born or grew up in Texas. That is the only possible way this makes any sort of sense as a listening experience. 

It can't be their first album, it just can't. This is only a thing you get to do if you have traction. I don't know what that traction is, per se, but this is The Rascals Freedom Suite, "just let 'em do it" level of absurdity. Cultural misinterpretation on Quaaludes. 

None of that means it's bad. An hour of it reverberating through my brain and i definitely want to hear it again, but it is wackadoodle on a level i didn't think possible after about 1967 (LSD was officially outlawed here in the US in 1968, for you narcotics history buffs). 

Again, i have looked up absolutely nothing about this band, but i expect there's a fair bit of confusion in classifying it. Is it Hip-Hop, is it Alt-something, is it Psych-Pop, is it all of the above? I don't know. It's Pop the way late Maroon 5 is Pop, but there's also honest to goodness Trap in there, falsetto R&B with video game sound effects, only one rap verse on the whole album, but multiple field recordings of a parent talking to a child about a rocket ship and other stuff. I hate to do this, but Gwen Stefani said it best: this shit is bananas! 

Now, all's fair, i've been talking out of my ass, so you guys and gals go look it up. What did i get right? What did i get wrong? Have you listened to it? What do you think? It's a lot to take in, but i'd be more than happy to give it a different set of ears next time around. It's definitely interesting.