Description
Label Review.
Double Thriller 1996, The Glands 2000 and Double Coda 2018.
Our Overview.
Indie rock band The Glands from Athens Georgia, released only two albums of weird, irascible, irresistible indie rock before band leader Ross Shapiro died in 2016: ‘Double Thriller’ 1996 and ‘The Glands’ 2000. The band went their separate ways after that, frontman Ross Shapiro opened a record store in Athens for a time, though they got back together in the early ’10s to play a few reunion shows, and there was a promise of new music on the horizon. Shapiro died in 2016, though, from lung cancer, and the rest of the band went about compiling Shapiro’s demos and recordings from the last two decades into a new, final Glands album. The Glands first two albums established Ross as an unlikely and maybe even unwilling cult artist; you could argue that not enough people bought ‘Double Thriller’ and ‘The Glands’, but everyone who did became avid fans for life.
Eighteen years after its last record, there couldn't be a better time to fall in love with The Glands. Not only are 1996's self-released ‘Double Thriller’ and 2000's self-titled gem of a masterpiece getting stand-alone vinyl reissues (the latter adds five rare songs and a new track sequence), but we're also getting deluxe box set titled ‘I Can See My House From Here', which includes an unreleased third album.
That third album, ‘Double Coda’ was cobbled together from two decades worth of Shapiro's demos and recordings, with final production overseen by founding member and drummer Joe Rowe, bassist Derek Almstead and Glands producer David Barbe. Like Double Thriller, like The Glands, every single one of these 23 tracks is a hit, and a testament to Shapiro's warped-yet-grounded sensibility.
We get two new songs today. There's "So High," featuring Ross Shapiro's falsetto croon over a soulful and slanted, Tom Petty style Southern rocker, warbly organ and distant la la las. That comes paired with a video shot at the 40 Watt in Athens, where The Glands would often perform. But the real gift is in "Electricity," which imagines an alternate world where Shapiro produced head-nodding trip-hop with an ear towards granular beats and quiet turntablism, but looped around an irresistible melody and guitar hook.
“As a fan of the music and as a fan of Ross, it was a labour of love to get this set out, to get as much of the music out as possible and into the ears of the people who loved him,” the band’s Derek Almstead said in a statement. “A lot of the material came from CD’s he’d give us at band practice, like ‘Here’s some stuff I’m working on.’ It might have the vocals buried or it might not be finished. I found the best versions of the songs and put together a three-CD set, something like sixty songs. We whittled that down to what ‘Double Coda’ is.”