A Sunny Day in Glasgow are a band from Philadelphia that plays dreamy pop music that uses lots of samples, guitars, and melodies. Their new record, Ashes Grammar, is out now, everywhere.
Pitchfork
"8.3 - ...pop music masterfully puzzled together...from a group of writers strong enough to keep you humming and courageous enough to make you guess."
BBC
"Second album Ashes Grammar is a raising of their game; a seamless, symphonic 22 tracks that twist and glitter like a lake of pristine morning mist. In effect one continuous movement of music, it has definition nonetheless, the swirl of floaty electronics, warm psychedelia...every so often crystallising into something approaching a pop song...The artisan level of songcraft poured in is quite staggering."
Coke Machine Glow
"88%...The songs hum like electricity and thump like groundswells, surprising and shifting with innovative pacing and dynamics. But they also sound natural and unhurried, seamlessly patched...A Sunny Day in Glasgow are writing years ahead of where they should be for such a young band, forming gargantuan records of consistently enjoyable and inventive melodic rock...Ashes is A Sunny Day’s stripes, their first truly great album of scope. If it’s any indication the group’s potential scales enormous. "
The Music Fix
"9/10...[ASDiG] made a big step-up from the DIY bedroom production of their debut, Scribble Mural Comic Journal, and the move to working in, as the liner notes describe it, 'a big room' has paid off. The album is full of huge sounds and the reverb-heavy production lends the album a cavernous feel at times, but the sensation of being once removed from the music, which at points can actually feel like you're hearing it from the next room, creates a wonderfully paradoxical mesh of bombast and intimacy. A honeycomb structure weaved with candyfloss, the wealth of ideas encased in this fuzzy gem will take an age to discover, and the contagious joy will keep you in raptures for just as long. "
Drowned in Sound
"8/10...Schizophrenic, surreal and fantastic – that’s Ashes Grammar"
Stereogum (track review)
"...gorgeous, dense then bright..."
The L Magazine
"An epic antidote to the creeping half-assedness of independent music at the decade’s end...the protean Philadelphia group’s second album, Ashes Grammar , is so beautiful and disorienting that a dodgy simile is the default reaction."
All Music Guide
"Ashes Grammar's artsy audio explorations are generally fashioned around solid skeletons of pop-oriented hooks...Those who power through this album, though, will be richly rewarded by ASDIG's diaphanous, highly intelligent take on noise pop."
Forest Gospel
"A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s follow up to their terrific debut, Scribble Mural Comic Journal, is getting super slept on, which is funnily ironic because it’s just about the dreamiest slice of pop to come out this year...The smooth, vibrantly echoing electronics, the wavy atmospherics, the mirror chamber of vocals and the hooks…THE HOOKS! Ashes Grammar is simply the album that keeps on giving."
Prefix
"listen to it back to front and it will feel like it's burrowing a hole in your head and filling it up with tangled yarn and sparkles and muddy bones and light."
Stereo Subversion
"When their first album dropped in early 2007, A Sunny Day in Glasgow barely registered at all on the new music radar. This is a huge shame as Scribble Mural Comic Journal was one of the most original and exciting debuts since TV on the Radio’s Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes. For their sophomore album, Ashes Grammar, they have thankfully retained their unconventionality and crafted a record worthy of inclusion among this year’s best."
Wears the Trousers
"Ashes Grammar sounds like techno on tranquilisers and moshpits on morphine...theme music for a summer nap in a poppy field, releasing itself from any limits, brackets or musical definitions...Ashes Grammar teases with filmy vocals, tickles lightly with words, sheds song structure and chooses to give the listener free rein, providing a title as framework and an album of distinction within a genre that may once more be losing its lustre."
The Yellow Stereo
"After listening to “Failure” for the first time, I was instantly reminded why I liked these guys. I’ve always had a rough time with people tossing the Shoegaze tag on them, as it just seems so lazy to label them with that. I’m not even sure if I could think of a genre to describe them outside of just a very dense, ambient-laden kind of dream pop. It’s music that’s completely lost within itself, which may not sound like much of a compliment, but it just makes as I listen to these songs (all 22 of them)."
If This Album was a Movie
"Wong Kar-Wai directs an atmospheric film using updated themes and plot points from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Bryce Dallas Howard stars as an up and coming American installation artist commisioned to complete a year long project in Tokyo. Her patron is a brutish and mysteriously alluring businessman played by Ken Watanabe. The pair grow closer in the confines of the art space, but the buisnessman’s real world dramas and involvement with the Yakuza gang threaten their lives and blossoming love. The artist’s troubled childhood is depicted in flashbacks facilitated through her yarn, string and fabric based installation projects."
Get in touch... Tell us a secret and/or join our mailing list: hello@asunnydayinglasgow.com Distro, licensing, radio, etc..., contact Steph: general (at) misojos-discos (dot) com US Press: Daniel Gill daniel@forcefieldpr.com
UK Press: Nita Goldstar nita@goldstarpr.com
North America Booking: Ben Buchannan ben@paquinentertainment.com
EU Booking: Celine Le Barbenchon celine@summery-agency.com
Barry Armpit and the Personification of Plates. Episode Three.
Barry Armpit went to ikea. He went to the kitchenware section. He felt he had been deserted by the inalienable human right to be anamalous crockery. He felt nothing. He left in disgust.
Hey there kids. I wanted to let you know that Too Much Rock has posted up photos and video of your show on Tuesday November 24th, 2009 at Replay Lounge in Lawrence, KS with Burger Kingdom.
any chance of a boston show this fall? yr playing in my hometown, under my record store, but before i return from school for the semester... would fucking love to see you guys.