Glassjaw - Coloring Book EP
Post-hardcore pioneers return once more, this time with a brand new EP.
Anticipation can taint opinion, can blind an audience to disappointment or dampen the impact of excellence. What it won’t stop you from being when you hear this EP, is surprised. Glassjaw have given us two new EPs in less than six months, but while the previous EP ('Our Color Green') consisted of ‘new’ songs that had appeared in live sets and myriad YouTube recordings of varying levels of poor quality for the past five years, 'Coloring Book' presents us with something we’ve been craving. New material.
Released free to ticketholders to their shows, 'Coloring Book' is a completely different beast to what we’ve heard before; if it didn’t feature the distinctive vocals of Daryl Palumbo, you could easily convince people this was a totally different band. This might send many into a blind panic, but it all depends on how much your musical taste relies on more of the same, because different as it is, this EP is excellent.
Slower and less aggressive than previous works, these tracks feature a more measured, more structured flow that retains an element of heaviness without any need for breakdowns or Palumbo’s screaming. That heaviness comes across here as menace, the tracks rumble with it. A bass line here is felt rather than heard, a guitar riff there is sheathed with a fuzz that rattles your ribcage, “No one gets out alive” Palumbo repeats during ‘Vanilla Poltergeist Snake’. Repetition is something else that's a defining part of 'Coloring Book'; lyrics crop up over and over during these tracks. ‘Gold’ – the highlight track in an EP of stand-outs – features vocals backed by an insistent, relentless guitar- line. The expansive sprawl of ‘Stations Of The New Cross’ is immersive, and closing track ‘Daytona White’ – with its skittering, jazzy drumming, organ and emotive vocal performance – is nothing short
of gorgeous.
On first listen, you might be put out that there’s nothing explosive here, that everything’s a little slower than you had expected. But one thing Glassjaw have never been is predictable. Another thing they have never been is a let-down. We genuinely don’t know what will happen next; will the new album be slower like this EP, or feature songs more akin to their previous releases? Will it take an entirely new direction, or will it be another eight bloody years before we get another release? Whatever happens next, though, you should be on board. If all change were as good as this, no one would ever fear it.
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