New Glue – The Electric Path

6.8.20 by Ryan Masteller

I was talking to someone just the other day (they will remain nameless – who knows what kinds of lawsuits might get thrown my way because of the internet), and we were both like, “Yeah, we need more of that ‘evaporated rhythm’ kosmische, because we’re not getting any calmer out here.” Lo and behold comes New Glue with not only a batch of back-to-basics kosmische tunes but also the kind that sounds like rhythm might once have stuck to it but has now gone as it’s dried out in the basement or the attic over time! I honestly don’t know how any part of a music can dry out, but New Glue does their dangdest to impart age on these compositions by suggesting something that was there but now isn’t.

In truth, and I have to be honest with you, there may have been rhythm at one point – the digital squirts on the title track are certainly in some sort of “time.” But “The Electric Path,” out (NOW) on Lighten Up Sounds, is by no means static or flat. It’s … wait for it … ELECTRIC.

So the person I was talking to was like, “Yeah, it’s not getting any calmer out there, everybody’s afraid of all the COVIDs. It’s time to take a collective chill pill.” Consider said chill pill delivered, ice cold, down the hatch, with “The Electric Path,” a self-stylized “soothing balm for burning brains.” New Glue is the duo of Jason Millard and Matthew Himes, who used to be Glue Clinic, but then put that aside for a while and came back with a new name and a new attitude. Lucky for us they’re putting on an ACTUAL, non-glue clinic here on “The Electric Path,” with synthesizers coming out the wazoo in order to produce “an eloquent ambience for these times of trauma.”

Down the hatch.

Maybe it’s all moot in the end, and the hawks will out-hawk each other and wipe themselves out and leave the rest of the place to us, the meek, those somehow promised an inheritance of the planet. But no – if New Glue is giving us any indication, it’s the knob-twiddlers that will inherit the Earth. Sure, it’s going to be a burned-out husk when they get their hands on it, but they’ll just twiddle more knobs and get us all to Zen out, ruling in a benevolent narcotic haze, like Bill and Ted’s holograms in the future, till the end swiftly comes. 

Related Links