Glasser - Ring

Cameron Mesirow just wants to express herself. Tired of living in a hole where freedom and innovation are restricted, where you’re at risk for thinking outside the box, where you cannot yelp. Mesirow yelps, jolts, hiccups and seethes under the moniker of Glasser - unafraid of embarrassment and judgement. Her debut album is as creative as you’d expect and only hints at a greater challenging of the laws of pop with future work.

In ‘Ring’, percussion comes from a hundred sources, Mesirow’s voice expresses itself with enthusiasm and ability, samples are manipulated from every angle, all resulting in something instantaneous and inventive at the same time.

It begins, as one might predict, with a yelp. ‘Apply’ announces the Glasser ethos; to surprise and provoke. Its sharp, characteristic vocals and gradual, memorable chorus flaunts Mesirow’s sound at its best. If the rest followed suit in such fashion, we’d have a flawless debut on our hands. The range within the album is phenomenal; sliding easefully from delicate, dense electronics (‘Mirrorage’) to the thick-bass and tribal percussion of ‘Tremel’, as if the challenge to blend such polar opposites didn’t daunt in the slightest. To place one song after the after is simply showing off.

The oriental foundations of ‘Glad’ and the smooth, Telepathe-esque low-key synths of ‘Home’ are even more gutsy in their arrival. Brief but integral string and brass parts help make up the substance, featuring in nearly every song for at least a split second. Specifically pointing a finger at certain fractions or segments of a song seems like nit-picking. If anything you could say that Mesirow occasionally steps too far aside from pop-inclinication, but to keep to a stubborn formula would be to ignore the very foundations of this daring debut album. That said, when Glasser strike rich with simple pop, they make quite an impression. ‘Plane Temp”s deft chant is infectious, and you can’t help but wish for more of the same. The truth is ‘Ring’ lacks in a career-high hit or a live favourite, but more than makes up for that with its output of new craft.

‘We’re the same / we’re all the same / set apart by different names’, Mesirow claims in ‘Treasury Of We’. But Mesirow is a rare treasure, an artist with such desire to recreate and set in motion ideas of such vitality that as an artist, she can only leap from one peak to the other. She sets herself apart from the others.