Emotionally charged songs played and sung with passion and honesty.
The Glass Hours are American songwriters Megan Barbera and Brad Armstrong. The indie country duo, originally from Colorado and Alabama, met in New York’s Hudson Valley in Summer 2022. At first sight the inevitable comparison with is Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, but fortunately it takes just one verse of first song Adaline to put that out of mind.
The rhythm section of Bassist Matt Patton and Jason Lucia on drums are a far bigger presence than on any Welch/Rawlings album, meaning there is a drive to the music that sets them apart, even on the slower songs like Man Who Had Everything. Armstrong’s electric guitar adds a mournful layer to a love song about passion and its fleeting nature. Their harmonies wrap themselves around the words like a warm memory.
North adds to the list of classic road trip songs. “We could go up north for a little while. Find the pieces of all that we left behind. I’ll drive the car and you choose the song. You and Neil singin’ “Winterlong”” The interplay of acoustic and electric guitar solos build a delightful country rock song into something impossible to sit still through. They have perfected the art of judging how long a song should be brilliantly. So far three songs in and each one has left the listener wanting more.
Not Your Ordinary Heart opens with Armstrong singing solo, over just a guitar. Without Barbera’s harmonies his voice has a vulnerable quality. Once Patton’s bass joins in the song develops a gentle groove, supplemented by an echo laden guitar and Baxter Arrender’s keyboards. All of these combine with the voices to produce an introspective feel to a song that their notes describe as: “people pass through our lives. Some stay around longer than others.”
The album was recorded at Matt Patton’s Dial Back Sound Studio in Water Valley Mississippi and produced by Clay Jones. It’s one of those studios which seems to have a sound all its own, and Armstrong and Barbera made good use of it by recording sitting in chairs facing one another and performing the album front to back with the rhythm section playing live in another room. They say that “making the record in this way brought honesty to the recordings that lifted them above what can be done with tracking, and underlined what was important about it: Megan and Brad, singing with one another, and through one another. Performance imperfections seem to point at the obvious truth of this time we are living in – that music, and indeed art, is becoming something less to be crafted into a perfect object and more something to be experienced in the moment, fleeting and fragile.” And they’re right the album has an immediacy to the sound that more heavily production would have lost.
Colorado, set in the landscape of her home state gives a vocal feature for Megan Barbera. She has a voice which is once familiar yet very much her own. Hearing them sing separately gives a clear idea of how good they both are and why the harmonies work so well. In The Morning is a song about leaving in search of and undefined something, and has a very Simon and Garfunkel quality, whether intentionally it’s hard to tell, but it’s very effective, and after a few plays this is one of the standout tunes. Not that across the ten songs here there is any room for anything less than their best, and that’s what they give us consistently.
Providence is a story song that Willy Vlautin would be happy with. Thee’s a whole movie or novel in it’s three and a half minutes. The opening lines “Don’t bury me in providence I can’t stand the rain. I can’t stand the thought of you walkin’ away” sets the scene and leads you into a world of desperately trying to pull yourself together. If this doesn’t feature on song of the year lists come Christmas there’s no justice.
You Set The Sun is a simple country love song, and the last full band song as the title track which closes the album is just voices and guitars. You can almost feel them sat together playing and singing with an intimacy of another duo, Over The Rhine, who like Glass Hours create emotionally intense songs which capture a moment or a feeling which almost anyone can relate to.
