Glüme

Glüme is the self-styled ‘Walmart Marilyn Monroe’ who on debut album, ‘The Internet’, effervescently and effortlessly mixes low-end mass consumerism with high-end popular cultural iconography. The end product being twelve kitsch in sync songs of contemporary filter-bubblegum echo-chamber pop.

Living with a heart disease called Prinzmetal has given Glüme a sense of apartness, (meta)physically and (better)psychically providing a panoptic purview of the motions of emotions through a hyper-optic lens.

Probing, prickling and tickling the sickly underbelly of the City of Vice and conducting on-off lines of enquiry in the deep vein of (oc)cult cine-auteur David Lynch or James Ellroy’s noirish tales of nocturnal ne’er-do-wells.

Resembling a hyperreal cyber-sentient breathing, living doll, Glüme adopts and adapts a mask of (and over) what constitutes prescribed perceptions. This at first glance exhibition of artifice offering the first glimpse of a profound surface. Thin-skin-deep and barely submerged lies in wait the child actor on the verge or emerging and evolving into a fully-formed performer. It’s showtime!

Throughout Glüme evokes a post-modem, postmodern Dory Previn, a pliable narrator, reliable orator dispensing supreme storytelling backed by (p)lush orchestration and atmos-fear. On the opening ‘Arthur Miller’ the esteemed playwright acts as the crucial crucible for embarking on the narrative of flatlining the American Dream, the last breath of the dying salesman, down, down Loman. Unquenched desire on a tripwire informs the passion-aggressive, commanding and demanding ‘Blossom’.

‘What … is a feeling’ and ‘Nervous Breakdown’ are a pair of ‘80’s hued synthetic down-soundscrapers. In the former it’s ‘all’ about the ellipsis. The pause, the thought, the hanging in the air of what’s next. A case of mind over (or under) matter. The latter is a reassurance to the inner-mechanics that internal collapse is a necessary part of rebuilding. As Glüme laconically and metaphorically states ‘It’ just like flying to the Moon’. The rhythms of life and love are lunar, see.

‘Get Low’ achieves its opposite: a chugging upbeat hip-swinging frisky-disco number. ‘Don’t @ me’ finds our antagonist (name withheld) bolady and baldly declaring ‘I don’t wanna make amends … I wanna make a mess’. There’s gonna be trouble in the rubble.

Brittle and fragile, ‘Porcelain’ might be (who am I to assert) an autobiographical self-reflexive statement from deep within the poisoned shell.

Overall, a triumphant and defiant display of determination in the face of adversity.