A Sunny Day In Glasgow at Rathskeller
If anyone’s ever wondered what a shoegaze band would sound like if it didn’t hurl its vocals through a reverb tornado, the Rathskeller was the place to be Friday night. Philadelphia’s A Sunny Day In Glasgow repeatedly asked for more reverb on the vocal mics, but the sound guy couldn’t come close to reproducing the wash of echo that soaked this year’s Ashes Grammar. However, between founder Ben Daniels and five others from his revolving cast of bandmates (and a little help from a laptop), the band reinterpreted its lush recordings passably.
In the tradition of all great shoegaze, ASDIG’s set was loud—really, really loud. From the scraping synth of set-opener “Evil, With Evil, Against Evil,” frontwomen Annie Fredrickson and Jen Goma threw their dense, lyrically indecipherable harmonies over a huge mess of abrasive sonics. Fredrickson danced wildly and shook a tambourine as Goma stood behind her mic stand in a daze. Crawling beneath the walls of fuzzy guitar provided by Josh Meakim and Daniels, bassist Ryan Newmyer helped make melodic sense of the swirling mess by steering it with simplistic basslines. Meanwhile, from the driving groove of "Things Only I Can See" to the bouncing pulse of "Shy," the quirky drumming of Adam Herndon locked in and bent perfectly to the sensibility of each tune. When the band blasted into the spaced-out stomp of “Failure” (which sounds a little like Bow Wow Wow being thrown into a well), a few members of the sparse audience stopped being too cool for school and actually began to dance. Within minutes, most of the crowd was cutting a rug, and the spacey Goma let loose with a surprised grin.
During “Ashes Maths,” Daniels pulled out a mandolin shaped like James Hetfield’s Gibson Explorer and played the most un-metal layer of charming mandolin pop in the history of un-metal charming mandolin pop. After ASDIG closed its set with the trickling synth-pop of “Things Only I Can See,” the underwhelming crowd—much to the band’s surprise—screamed for an encore. A delighted Daniels came back on stage and restored some metal cred by asking the crowd if they “know who sings ‘Hybrid Moments.’” To The A.V. Club’s surprise, the band then ripped into a blistering rendition of the Misfits classic, sending the crowd into one final dance spasm.
