Glare – Sunset Funeral | Album Review
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Deathwish Inc.
Music nerds love to talk about tone. As a failed musician myself, I’m obsessed with a great tone despite never being able to achieve one in any of the bands I’ve been a part of over the last fifteen years. I could write a novel’s worth about records with great tones, like the futuristic post-punk frenzy of Wipers’ 1981 seminal sophomore LP Youth Of America, the thick smoked-out sound of Acid King’s 1999 stoner rock masterpiece Busse Woods, or the crystal-clear shimmering production of Porcupine Tree’s 2005 contemporary prog cornerstone Deadwing. It’s one thing to have an album full of great songs, but when the songs actually sound great and everything is dialed in just the way it should be, the listening experience is that much better. That is the case with Sunset Funeral, the tonally impressive debut album from Texas alternative rock group Glare.
The old adage of bands having their entire lives to make their first album is Glare’s call to arms: for eight years, they’ve been slowly churning out singles and EPs, starting with 2017’s Into You and 2018’s Void In Blue, both successful initial projects that have garnered millions of streams since their release last decade. In 2021, Glare returned with Heavenly, their most substantial offering thus far but still not completely reflective of the band they’ve become. Their eleven-song output that precedes this new album is but a blueprint, a test run, a work in progress, the calm before the Sunset. These new eleven songs that make up the band’s debut LP are explosive from top to bottom and result in some of the biggest-sounding independent rock music I’ve heard in the last year and a half. This is a windows-down with the car radio cranked type of album, a get-a-call-from-your-landlord-to-stop-making-so-much-noise-during-“quiet-hours” type of album, a blissed-out blast of ‘90s alternative reignited for the modern era.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: the band name Glare, the album name Sunset Funeral, the dreamy pastel photo album cover that goes with it, and the track names therein like “Chlorinehouse” and “Different Hue” all make it very obvious what this band is all about: thickly layered guitars, vocals so washed in reverb you could shower in them, and a general reliance on big, atmospheric rock that lets them sit comfortably with contemporaries like Downward and Prize Horse. The band and album scream modern shoegaze (or, blech, “nugaze”), but they scream it with such confidence: a big pedal energy attitude of ‘This is who we are, this is what we do, and we’re going to do it as well, if not better than anyone in the monsoon of bands filled with former emos who discovered the classic run of Dinosaur Jr. albums.’ Additionally, Glare further sets themselves apart from everyone else with their tone expertly dialed in on each element. It’s one thing to get the guitars just right in a shoegaze band: that’s the part most people focus on, but Glare has clearly spent the time to make sure every member’s instrument is showcased in a noticeable way. Perhaps the strongest of them is the drums, which have one of the clearest and most thunderous sounds on a modern record of this style that I’ve ever heard.
If you heard any of the Sunset Funeral advance cuts — the sweet and groovy “Guts,” the full-force rocker “Nü Burn,” or the overarchingly thematic tone-setting album opener “Mourning Haze” — you already got a taste of Glare’s perfection of their genre. It’s not always common for a band to deliver an entire project that lives up to, and in some cases exceeds, the power of its singles, but that’s only part of what makes this album feel so special. As soon as I turned on “Mourning Haze” for the first time, I couldn’t believe how great it sounded for a first song, with its room-filling volume and a power that I’ve rarely heard matched this decade. There are only about twenty seconds of relenting when “Kiss The Sun” comes in next, until it bursts into another bright headbanger, riding the line of melody and heaviness reminiscent of influential bands like Torche and Hum.
Sunset Funeral is an album that feels so good to be lost in; its pacing is such a perfect rhythm that it’s easy not to notice that you’re halfway through the tracklist by the time “Nü Burn” begins. Glare seamlessly weave their way through every moment of this record, even down to the instrumental interlude “Felt,” which builds up to “Nü Burn” just as breezily as it winds down from “Chlorinehouse.” The soft closer “Different Hue” glides along so smoothly that it sounds completely natural leading back into “Mourning Haze” if you start the record over again. I love finding great three-track runs on albums, like “Begin The Begin” -> “These Days” -> “Fall On Me” on R.E.M.’s 1986 alternative classic Lifes Rich Pageant, or the semi-suite of “Closer You Are” -> “Auditorium” -> “Motor Away” on Guided By Voices’ 1995 landmark lo-fi odyssey Alien Lanes. You could throw a dart anywhere on Sunset Funeral and get a great three-track run, which I suppose makes the entire album a great eleven-track run, a rare feat in 2020s emo-adjacent music.
In a style that can often be monotonous or too heavy-handed in its ‘90s worship, Glare stands atop the slew of guitar rock bands with finesse, grace, and panache (pardon my French). Whether it’s on more relaxed tracks like “Saudade” and the almost-eponymous “Sungrave,” or on any of the bombastic singles, the band breathes new life into shoegaze with every second of Sunset Funeral’s runtime. It’s one of the tightest debut albums I’ve heard from a new band this decade, and possibly even on a longer timeline than that. I have no doubt that by 2030, Sunset Funeral will be talked about the way we talk about Nothing’s Guilty Of Everything, Title Fight’s Hyperview, and Turnover’s Peripheral Vision, and for my money, I’d put it above those last two for sure. Get sucked in by the sunset, Glare is here.
Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.
