Glitterer is the solo project of Ned Russin, who's perhaps better known as the bassist and co-vocalist of the Kingston, Pennsylvania hardcore-turned shoegaze maestros Title Fight. The group has been on hiatus for the better part of five years, but they were a foundational punk band in the early 2010s who mortared together melodic hardcore, pop-punk, emo, shoegaze, and indie-rock before "post-genre" became the defining trait of the last decade. Unlike Title Fight, who never settled on a single sound for more than one album, Russin has been honing Glitterer's singular style of explosive power-pop since 2017, and his fourth release under this moniker, Life Is Not A Lesson, is his most focused yet.
The early Glitterer material captured Russin's first experiments with the solo singer-songwriter format, and therefore had a crude, homemade quality to them. However, for 2019's Looking Through The Shades (his first for ANTI- records), Russin teamed up with esteemed metal producer Arthur Rizk and indie-rock visionary Alex G to help give his simple yet expressive songs the punchy sheen they deserved. For Life Is Not A Lesson, Russin recorded and produced the whole thing himself and then had Rizk mix and master it. The result wasn't so much growth, but consistency. The components of a Glitterer song remain the same: sticky power-pop melodies layered with thick shoegaze guitar tones and delivered with a tuneful yet gruff vocal affect. The stiff, column-esque power-chords are played with the battering-ram intensity of Jesus and the Mary Chain, as demonstrated on the aggressively fuzzy opener, "Bodies."
All of the energy comes from the guitars and Russin's gritty yelp that balloons to the yelly peak of his range by the end of each song, but all of the artful decisions are employed with synthesizers. "How A Song Should Go," which sees Russin airing his frustrations with the doldrums of songwriting, features a fat, squelchy analog synth that imbues the track with a colorful, gurgling texture. The propulsive "Indeed" features dueling synths, one squeaky and one bubbling beneath the surface, that swim neatly beside one another. But the most emotionally interesting moment on the record arrives when everything congeals on the album highlight, "I Made the Call" where Russin holds sustained keyboard notes that beam up above his vocals while he sings with a detached poignancy—a softer, more reserved delivery than any other song on the record. The bass is throttling, the fuzz crashes like waves, and eventually a searing guitar solo pummels through the mix before dissolving into screaming feedback. This is a masterclass in loud, physically imposing pop-rock. © Eli Enis/Qobuz