Music Time: A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Nitetime Rainbows

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A Sunny Day in Glasgow

Nitetime Rainbows

Mis Ojos Discos, March 2010

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Oh man, I love that this happened. I hit play to listen to “Nitetime Rainbows,” the lead and title track for this EP (extracted from last year’s pretty colossal full-length Ashes Grammar). Immediately there’s this sonic…vista, I guess you’d call it. Alternating between high soaring notes and low humming notes, held and stretched via god-knows-what heavily processed instrument, creating this beautifully vast and glowing space in my head. And I think to myself, “Wow, this sounds like what the Rainbow Bridge level in Mario Kart would sound like if you were standing there on the starting line.” Only then do I remember that hey, this song has the word “Rainbows” in the title.

That opening section is so strong, the portrait it paints so clear and complete, that the rest of the song still feels like the slow unraveling of potential contained within the introduction. That’s the intelligence of Ben Daniels’ and Josh Meakim’s songwriting at work. Structurally, “Nitetime Rainbows” is a series of interlocking but still discrete sections, shifting from one to the other with each new instrument introduced–a Byrds-style guitar line; a beat that sounds like you’re hearing it from several houses over; ethereal chirping wordless vocals–or each element dropped–the whole jangly schmear pretty much eliminated in favor of the distant-sounding bassline from the intro, with only an echoing whirr to accompany it–or each melodic shift up or down. At long last almost everything stops for just a beat or two, until the vocals return at their clearest yet, and an insistent dunk-dunk-dunk rhythm grounds everything in a way that feels sure and certain–to quote The House Next Door, a retrospectively inevitable destination. The finish line!

What I like about this EP is the way the rest of it reflects what’s going on in the title track. “Daytime Rainbows” and its doo-doo-doing vocals and sunny guitar feels like what the title implies–a looser, freer, brighter answer to the “Nitetime” version. “So Bloody, So Tight” takes the rhythmical chiming of “Nitetime”‘s guitars off into a synthier direction, which “Pianos Lessons” follows up on even more directly, its Krautrock repetition depicting what the Rainbow Bridge might be like for the drivers.

A trio of “Nitetime Rainbows” remixes closes out the EP, beginning with the Buddy System remix, which shuffles around the original’s constituent parts. Benoit Pioulard’s impossibly huge-sounding “Acid Wash Edit” blows out the original intro into gigantic, distorted rumblings, feeding into solar-wind gusting and whistling. Finally, Ezekiel Honing’s remix strips away all the lushness and fullness, reducing it to an eerily disjointed succession of sporadic handclaps, breathing sounds, a heartbeat, a repeated two-note riff, a hum like some ancient machine, and eventually a mournful acoustic-guitar strum. It’s the “Nitetime” to Pilouard’s all-“Rainbows” remix–the starfield surrounding the Rainbow Bridge.

Does it all sound very Court of the Crimson King, very Roger Dean? It ought to. It’s spectacle, not through prog virtuosity but through sheer sonic architecture–meaning both size and structure. It’s big, big music, of the sort that invites whatever worldbuilding the psychedelic part of your brain is capable of. Since Nintendo has been my mind-alterer of choice for the past year or so, that’s what I see: a ribbon of light winding its way through space. Double rainbows all the way across the sky, folks. So intense! And isn’t wonderful that music can do that?