That those three little words are the key to this richly complicated, exhilaratingly vital album is clear from its first moments. Chilly, pale fingers of synth reach out and sweep like searchlights, and a voice intones in French. “Souffrance, vous n’avez jamais existé”. It’s a slow counting-under into the sometimes obscure, hazy, dazzlingly ornate dreamworld of ‘Euphoric ///Heartbreak \’, its message first cloaked in another language and then beneath layers of glowing fuzz as James Allan begins to repeat the words, in English, in a hypnotist’s whisper.
‘Pain, Pain, Never Again’ is as dense, as grandiose, as sci-fi Vangelistic an opening track as you might have expected once you’d seen January’s NME cover, on which Allan appeared with Roy’s dying soliloquy from Blade Runner daubed over his bare chest, the final words changed from ‘time to die’ to ‘time to live’.
If that clue hinted at the ‘heartbreak’ of the album’s title that headlines were subsequently to spell out, here, if you’re listening closely, Allan addresses it, and his sister and manager, face on: “Denise, Denise, look at the swan that sails…” he hisses. “And a triumphant me and you, again and again and again… the end credits naming us as the majestic escapists of cocaine”.
It’s the only direct (if you can call it direct) reference Allan will make to his 2009 overdose, because this 2011 album is not about that, not really.
Glasvegas are much, much better than second album ‘my drug hell’, and from the starting point of one person’s darkest hour, ‘Euphoric ///Heartbreak \’ guides you up and out towards dawn, through the restlessly rumpled sheets of many dreamers.
It traverses a spacious, synth-dusted soundworld many future dreampop miles from their girl-group and grit beginnings; the ambition will be a sonic shock to those who wanted the band to stay the ‘working-class heroes’ they wryly joke about being. It shouldn’t, really. If one toe-capped boot probed the gutter on their debut, their eyes were always on the stars; now they’re just gazing from a little closer.
The sleep cycles spin you deeper as Allan insistently repeats “pain, pain, never again”, until with a kicking jolt like a dream of falling, ‘The World Is Yours’ plunges you into fantasy. The deft switch from that “end credits… cocaine” line to the Scarface-referencing title of a song that races clear of personal pain into universal do-or-die urgency, is breathtaking, Allan urging, “Let’s not leave it to another time/Remember in the midst of my dreams when I dreamed that you were mine”. This dream is a lucid one, in which choices, chances and tipping points ripple through into waking life.
If you’re not listening to the album’s cues quite so closely, to drift from this big-time brashness into the murkily mesmerising aquatic dreampop of ‘You’ might be confusing. That’s OK; dreams usually are confusing, and rarely yield their meanings without a little analysis. You could sift these dark waters for weeks and, happily, whatever effort you put in will be repaid in full.
Jump-cutting from the ether to another slumber scene, ‘Shine Like Stars’shifts up a gear in the race towards daylight, rawly romantic, synthily sleek, Allan crying, “I see the black fade to grey/I feel forwards as the only way”. Allan said as far back as 2009 that this would be an album of love songs, and choosing life here is always choosing love. Sonically and lyrically, ‘Whatever Hurts You Through The Night’ is the grandest of its gestures, sugarspun Sistine Chapels of synth arching upwards through cheesy soft rock drums. It’s ‘Take My Breath Away’, it’s ‘It Must Have Been Love’, it’s ‘Love Song For A Vampire’, all soundtracking the ballroom scene from Labyrinth.
It’s ludicrously overblown, saturated with soppiness, but then, so is love if you’re doing it properly. If that song knowingly hurls itself open to scorn, thrusting a pair of tracks subtitled ‘Homosexuality Part 1’ and ‘… Part 2’before a cynical world might seem like bravado. Beyond the baldness of those words, though, there’s nothing more controversial than another exploration of ‘Euphoric ///Heartbreak \’’s constant choice between “the ubiquitous demon named shame” identified in ‘Pain, Pain, Never Again’ and the difficult path to happiness. Or, as the speaker of the softly flooring, Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’-by-way-of-Cocteau Twins ‘I Feel Wrong’ puts it, “It’s only love”.
Between these two comes the album’s thundering heart. ‘Dream Dream Dreaming’ takes ‘Mr Sandman’ and ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’, songs in which sleepy imaginings offer a chance for otherwise impossible consummation, but here it’s familial rather than romantic, as Allan adopts his father’s voice to address his uncle and namesake, who hung himself when Allan was a teenager. Both an imagined apology from brother to brother, and a token from son to father to redress the balance of ‘Daddy’s Gone’, it’s an astounding emotional powerhouse that wrings magic from the shittest of situations.
Springsteenian and beyond in scope, with war-in-heaven drums and tearing vocals, it throws off guilt, grasps pain by the thorns and tries to cheat death. As the whole world hangs on a drumbeat, a heartbeat, before that third chorus whacks back in with the force of a last chance, just for a moment, it succeeds.
For an album that so exalts optimism, the ordering of the final two tracks seems odd at first. The stark, spoken-word and piano benediction of‘Change’ would surely be better rounded off by the climactic, scream-from-the-mountaintops-as-they-crumble-to-the-sea declaration of almost lost love that is ‘Lots Sometimes’. Surely better to go out on a high? Well, no, because the right choice is never easy, as closing the album with Allan’s duet with his mother reminds us.
Beneath its surface story of a young boy’s fears on release from prison, deeper layers of meaning, of apology and reassurance, come into play. Again, it’s pretty clear what else informed the performance now, and as‘Pain, Pain…’ subtly opened the album with that concrete context, here again the subtlest of touches bookends it with meaning. As mournful chords ring out, a snatch of radio can be heard; ‘Daydream Believer’, of course. Then the sounds of a birthday party drift in; Allan’s, in Santa Monica, one he might not have seen.
But with the details so hidden the choice, the change, could be anything and anyone’s, and Elizabeth Corrigan’s bare, warm words will undo you as she gently admonishes “before you change for me… change for you”. It’s an honest, open ending, an awakening that reminds the listener, as Yeats had it, that in dreams begin responsibilities.
Glasvegas have already lived up to theirs, and how.
Emily Mackay
Download: ‘Dream Dream Dreaming’, ‘Lots Sometimes’, ‘Whatever Hurts You Through The Night’
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