Ashes Grammar

What kind of critical approach can one take toward an album like Ashes Grammar, one that refuses to respect structural boundaries, whose songs stretch across multiple tracks in a capricious, seemingly arbitrary manner? To consider songs as individualized structures is useless when it comes to A Sunny Day In Glasgow’s latest effort. The Philadelphian group — once a duo, now swelled to a full six-member band — have made an album that eschews pop conventions without appearing self-consciously labored or over-intellectualized. (I’m looking at you, Dirty Projectors.)

On 2007’s Scribble Mural Comic Journal, Philadelphia’s A Sunny Day in Glasgow blossomed into a formidable talent wielding their own tweaked strand of shoegaze/dream-pop. It is a feat all the more impressive given that those are two seemingly exhausted genres. Their particular strand nods as much to usual suspects like My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins as it does to current psych-dabbling electronic act s like High Places, Caribou, and Four Tet. The songs on Scribble Mural Comic Journal were simultaneously diaphanous and dense with sound without ever feeling formless or grating. The band continues this delicate balancing act on Ashes Grammar, although with less success.