Salad Boys – This Is Glue (Trouble In Mind)

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Cantabrian outfit Salad Boys’ second album, This Is Glue, opens with a propulsive beat, chugging guitar, and lyrics about driving. It has, from the first few seconds, the feeling of going somewhere.

Throughout the following eleven tracks on This Is Glue the band indeed go through many different places: some of them interesting places, some of them the indie-rock equivalents of bland stopover petrol station towns. One thing that’s not clear however, is their intended destination. In fact, the album can be summed up by one of its song titles – Scenic Route To Nowhere. It’s pleasing and easy on the ears, but for the most part too generic to leave me satisfied (though ironically that song, as I will discuss, is a definite highlight.)

The opening track, Blown Up, it itself a fairly unremarkable piece of garage rock, and if it was positioned anywhere else on the album would be easily overlookable. But as the opener it does a good job as hype man. It soon turns out, however, that a hype man was unnecessary. The second track, misleadingly titled Hatred, is a dissimilar slice of summery strumming pop, complete with ringing Byrds-like twelve-string riffs. The band feels perfectly natural and at ease, and, though it might be because I’m writing this on a sweltering summer’s day, I think it makes for a much better track than the opener.

Then we find out it’s an alternation game we’re playing here. Next track Psych Slasher delivers more mosh-happy but musically uninteresting indie rock, not improved by the spacey synthesizer, but is followed by another woozy garage pop piece, Right Time. The first half of the album continues to progress in this way. The mid-tempo jangly cuts, of which album highlight Exaltation is the strongest, show off a sense of melody and songwriting craft from vocalist Joe Sampson that is absent from the much more contemporary-sounding indie rock songs.

Not that slowing it down is a guarantee of success, as proved by the two tracks that kick of the album’s second half, In Heaven and Under The Bed. And even the highlights up to this point aren’t exactly the most original takes on vintage garage pop either. Sampson’s vocals are too often low in the mix and/or unclear, and as a result no lyrics jump out to stay with you (you’ll have to check the Bandcamp page for proof of his lyrical ability). Even where melodies and simple pop songwriting succeed, the instrumentals rarely add anything of interest, alternately jangling and fuzzy guitars blending with nondescript bass and drums into a pleasing but forgettable background setting.

Then something happens in the album’s last quarter – it gets interesting. The opening of Dogged Out immediately jumps out because, unlike much of the album to this point, it’s texturally interesting. A tremolo-laden clean electric guitar is plucked sparsely over bright acoustic strumming, bass notes that are finally clear, and drumsticks clacking on the rims of the kit, recorded as though you can hear it in the room in front of you. Compositionally the song doesn’t end up going anywhere, but it’s a welcome sonic change.

Up next, Scenic Route To Nowhere is only similar in that it also doesn’t sound like anything else on the album, and is another highlight. A punchy garage-rock beat chugs away under Sampson’s heavily kiwi-accented spoken narration. The lo-fi recording of this piece makes it sound like a band playing in a garage, the sound of the room clear, unlike the different lo-fi production that muddies so many of the other songs. In short, it has what a lot of the otherwise nice tracks lack – strong character. Plus the snare sounds fantastic, a musical pet love of mine.

Going Down Slow follows with a ringing psychedelic guitar riff and some great violins, used tastefully with the woody sound of the individual instruments left clear. Then we’re seen off with the fuzzy groove of Divided and one of the few vocal lines that stands out clearly – “on the cusp of a leaf I carry myself, carry myself, carry myself”.

It seems strange to me that the group have tucked away the most creative and musically interesting pieces at the end of the album, almost as if hesitant to show them upfront, opening instead with a run of mostly generic compositions. God knows why. I sincerely hope that the best moments on This Is Glue will act as threads to future more innovative and confident full-lengths, cause there’s certainly no lack of potential here.

Ruben Mita

The 13th Floor
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