Bandcamp In January, Daily Thompson took eight songs from Dortmund to Port Orchard, Washington, and handed them to Tony Reed to mix and master. Reed ended up playing on the record too. It is a specific decision with a specific cost attached, and the useful question about GLUE is what the trip bought them.
Two things, mostly, and both of them are the right two.
The first is the voice. Danny Zaremba’s baritone sits dry and close and very far forward, and Reed has left it there without smoothing the rasp off it. On “Fake A Smile” that placement does the whole job: the verses are reduced to a few notes of clean guitar and a voice almost too close to the microphone, and when the chorus lands the jump is genuinely large because nothing has been levelled to meet it. “Lovebugs” works the same seam and then breaks itself open with an arpeggio bridge a couple of minutes in, which is the sort of arrangement decision that only pays off if the master has left room for it.
The second is the middle of the frequency range. This is a warm, mid-forward record with real chord definition inside the saturation, and that combination is harder than it sounds when the guitars are this fuzzed. “Heart Of Bones” opens with the guitars spread wide and still legible, and “SIAM” is the most polished thing here, the vocal glass-clear over a full stereo wall.
What the trip did not resolve is separation at the bottom. Across most of the album the bass is a round, warm bed rather than an instrument with its own line, and it tends to merge into the low end of the guitars. In this genre that is arguable rather than wrong, because the records Daily Thompson name as their reference points do exactly the same thing, and a grunge bass that sits under the guitars instead of beside them is period-correct. It stops being arguable on “Here I Stand”, where the kick and the bass pile up between roughly 150 and 350 Hz and take headroom the chorus guitars needed, so the biggest moment on the track arrives slightly smaller than it was written. “Chains” edges toward the same crowding at full arrangement, and the limiter tightens on its peaks.
Then there is “BTK”, which is the reason to pay attention.
Mercedes Lalakakis-Bee takes the lead for the whole song, the first time she has done that on a Daily Thompson record, and the production shifts underneath her to match. The mid emphasis turns earthy, the room gets dry and close, and the drums lose the clicked front edge they carry elsewhere in favour of pressure through the low end. Her delivery moves from steady melodic singing to raw, overdriven screaming by the final section, and then the band walks the whole thing down into several minutes of reduced drone. Seven minutes, no chorus doing the heavy lifting, and the most dynamic range on the album by a distance.
The band describe GLUE as the clearest expression yet of the friendships the group is built on. That is the sort of line that usually means nothing, except here it is backed by a structural decision: they gave a third of the record’s running time to two long songs and handed one of them entirely to the bass player. Bands that talk about friendship and then keep the microphone tend not to do that.
Eight tracks, no filler, a voice worth the trip and a rhythm section that is finally being written for rather than around. If the next one keeps “BTK” as the template instead of the exception, it will be the best thing they have done.
“BTK” is the outlier in every measurable way: an earthy analog mid emphasis, a dry compact room, a kick defined by low-end pressure rather than a clicked attack, and a snare deliberately short on brilliance, all of which leaves the dynamic swing intact through the scream section and into the drone. “Fake A Smile” holds the album’s cleanest loud-quiet contrast with no audible pumping from the limiter. “Here I Stand” is the weakest picture, the low mids between roughly 150 and 350 Hz crowded enough to cost the chorus its lift and the cymbals going flat under full load. “SIAM” is the most polished and pays the standard loudness cost at its chorus.
Standout tracks: BTK, Fake A Smile, Lovebugs
