Review: plastic death by glass beach released via Run for Cover
Took me weeks to review this one sixty-three minutes is a long time.
It’s hard to break plastic death into pieces as it feels more like an experience than a collection of songs working together. Instrumentally glass beach go on a journey on plastic death. The early parts of the record are somewhere between mathcore and cinema and, like the ocean getting darker the deeper you go, it gets stranger and stranger the further down you dive. Nothing ever quite sounds like you expect it to, opening track “coelacanth” has an outro I would call grandiose but also it’s untuned, discordant, almost clunky and yet still effective. No track on the whole project really sticks to one lane though, like the aughts-core slash big triumph mess on “motions.”
This is my introduction to glass beach so I have no prior context, but when I personally like plastic death most is when they’re jamming instrumentally as vocally I sort of feel a lack of inspiration. Songs like “cul-de-sac” work for me sonically but feel like we’re sort of mumbling along on the vocal side. Every so often, however, we allow ourselves to feel everything in the moment and in those moments everything works together like on “rare animal.” Here not only is there grand production and a strong finale there’s also some real passion to the leads here.
My biggest actual criticism of this album though is its length. Some of these tracks are great in theory but in practice become a little self-indulgent. “Slip under the door” feels like diving into the unknown, the very thing I praised this band for earlier, but at over five minutes feels like it's overstaying its welcome. None of this to say the song lengths ruin them over and over again, in fact the near ten minute “comatose” avoids this. This track feels gigantic and well earned with my main speculation being wondering if we could have arrived at this fantastic almost-closer in less time. What I’m trying to say is there’s a lot of good ideas here but sometimes they feel sort of buried in the album’s total runtime and like I don’t get to be in the experience amongst all the filler.
I would not call this album great but I also wouldn’t call it bad or even mid, glass beach aims to do their thing and they do succeed in it. As I said my main issue comes from feeling like there’s a lot of unnecessary time spent on certain twists and turns and as a result, on repeat listens, I sort of just want to skip around to the tracks I liked best as opposed to taking on the entire thing.
Our score of plastic death is 7/10.
Our favorite track is track 10, The CIA.
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