I’ve just thought of another advantage of the cassette as a delivery medium for music. They fit through your letterbox so you don’t have to get out of bed when the postman calls. Getting out of bed doesn’t seem to have the point it used to have and, if it wasn’t for antique musical formats, I reckon that I would stay there (at least until I ran out of beer anyway). Today’s cassette – a sort of bronze coloured one in a clear case this time – comes from Gladness, is called “Monotony” and was released by Glasgow’s CUSP Records.
The music? Apparently, this album got its initial release last year so you might well have heard it before but I hadn’t. It is an odd confection indeed. Laidback almost to the point of tripping out of earth’s gravitational pull, the Gladness way is the way of the non-song with the melody interpolated with blasts of fuzzed to the max guitars as if to obscure the impact of those laconically delivered, and often sonically smudged, vocals. Once isn’t really enough to find your way through “Monotony” as it really is the kind of album that needs to loop through your headphones a few times while the sun goes down.