The Test Drive: The Golden Glows – On Moonlight And Rain

The Golden Glows are set to release their new album titled ‘On Moonlight and Rain’ tomorrow (April 1st). Constructed as a concept and achieved through pure imagination, The Golden Glows deliver an album of abstract construct that surrounds you with audio imagination and shows that the music is brighter outside of the box. Take that for what you will, but this is a quiet genius of genre-hopping time resistant music.

About The Golden Glows

Americana, Antwerp based trio The Golden Glows have been together for 15 years. Their warm three-part harmony is central to music from the 1920’s, prison songs from the 40s, proto-blues, early jazz and century old folksongs. The band acquired a reputation for their tasteful arrangements of long forgotten melodies, somewhere on the fringe of pop music. Their new album On Moonlight and Rain draws inspiration from the past once again, but in a completely different time and place: 18th Century Japan.

Ugetsu Monogatari or ‘Tales of Moonlight and Rain’ is a collection of supernatural stories published in 1776 by Udea Akinari. This masterpiece of Japanese Gothic inspired The Golden Glows to write nine ghost songs. The album follows the rhythm and the structure of the collection, but the songs are – for the first time in the band’s history – completely original lyrically and musically.

Enchanted by the supernatural elements, the vivid, dark imagery and universal themes like love and lust, abandonment, estrangement, loss or missed opportunities, The Golden Glows transformed the original Medieval horror tales into an otherworldly pop album. Ghosts became uncanny metaphors for their own feelings of longing, loss or long-gone love. Blending autobiography with fiction, Asian sensibility with European aesthetics, literature with pop music, the band created an original hybrid that seamlessly fit with the dark romanticism of their earlier work.

Musically, the band’s trademark harmonies are enriched with lush musical colours. Synths, piano, electric guitars, lapsteel, banjo, drums, vibraphone, marimba and electronics seamlessly blend into an adventurous landscape of sound. With ‘On Moonlight and Rain’ The Golden Glows sculpted a dark blue dream world from the remains of the eponymous show that was staged in 2017, in collaboration with Icelandic producer Valgeir Sigurdsson (Bedroom Community) and baroque ensemble BOX. This time around, the music is more pop and rock oriented. There are subtle references to Japanese minimalism and ambient music from the early 1980’s. A strong and versatile studio band of seven is complemented with the programming and electronics of Berlin based producer Koenraad Ecker, who brings the perfect balance between acoustic warmth and poetic electronic refinement to the album.

‘On Moonlight and Rain’ was recorded in 2021, in the midst of a global pandemic. In between two lockdowns The Golden Glows managed to record this album in a studio environment. Although it was written much earlier and is released at the brink of the third covid year, this piece of dream pop offers a welcome escape from the daily reality of graphs, vaccinations, face masks and 1.5m distance rules. On Moonlight and Rain is an escape into a world of fantasy and emotion. It fuses past and present and takes the listener into an imaginative dream world, out of time and out of this world.

As a video for one of the songs, The Golden Glows have produced a 3D anime film in collaboration with the Japanese artist Shunsaku Matsurida. On Moonlight and Rain will be released on vinyl on the 1st of April 2022, followed by a brief club tour in Belgium and a selection of prestigious summer festivals.

LINKS:
https://goldenglows.be
https://www.facebook.com/The-Golden-Glows-148117058554312
https://www.onmoonlightandrain.com