Collectively, Halcyon Days sounds like a recycled Last Dinosaurs record, with most of the songs sharing eerily similar guitar riffs to the Dinosaurs’ In A Million Years. The only difference is Jordan Leser, but she doesn’t have a large enough role to really stand out.
Glass Towers’ Halcyon Days pays tribute to the idyllic memory of youth, with 11 episodic moments of lead singer Ben Hannam’s formative years. On the surface Halcyon Days is a punk record, but the regular appearances by Sydney songstress Jordan Leser lend the album an undertone of indie folk fragility.
But while there’s some versatility, it’s brief. The guitar chords in the opening track ‘In This City’ are repeated in ‘Castles’, with a stagnant drum pattern that only changes in tempo. Like the prelude of Last Dinosaurs’ ‘Zoom’, which opens with a muffled guitar solo before bursting into full volume, ‘Jumanji’ follows a very similar pattern, opening with an almost identical muffled guitar riff before kicking into the song. Halcyon Days does do credit to Hannam’s vocal dexterity, making use of his range and falsetto.
The final track ‘Foreign Time’ is a big surprise, its minimalism refreshing after a stream of monotony. Complete with ethereal harmonies, acoustic guitar and a banjo, the beauty of ‘Foreign Time’ is that it sounds nothing like its predecessors. Sounding more like a Sufjan Stevens song than Glass Towers, it’s the antithesis of the entire album, a sound and style that will hopefully be reinvented in Glass Towers’ future.
2.5/5 stars
BY DINA AMIN
Halcyon Days is out now through HUB/Intertia Records.
