so here's how it is for me: glass beach album number one (titled 'the first glass beach album' and referred to here as lp1) is rats, aliens, garage screaming, empty roads, and crunchy synths. glass beach album number two (titled 'plastic death' and referred to here as pl) is deep-sea trenches, aliens, coral reef cams, and empty hallways. This description isn't perfect and will change, but let me explain:
lp1's 'brand' to me is crunchy experimental and pop punk stuff. neon glow, cold weather, bedroom community, and yoshi's island are the pop-punk garage part of garage screaming, they sound like something I know very well, that kind of genre. bad explanation. but bedroom community also belongs to the screaming part of garage screaming, along with orchids, soft, and (of course) glass beach. this category is a lot less "angsty poppy fun teen" garage screaming and a lot more "suicide hotline" screaming. the first album feels a lot rawer in this regard, with all the drawn out agony'd passages. in the vaguer synth experiment category I'd put rat castle, planetarium, calico, and some soft and bone skull, but know that the whole album is rife with synth and chiptune. It's part of what associates this album more with the internet for me, because it sounds more "web" digital as opposed to "cosmic horror" digital. the rawness and the kind of "teenager things" association I have in my mind between pop-punk and personal webpages also doesn't help matters.
Anyway, rat castle and planetarium are super fucking crunchy. I dpn't know if that's the right word, but you hear the little rat castle percussion, you feel it in the same place you feel biting into. I don't know. a rice cake but better. a meringue but not sugary? fresh qater but with a lot more texture. I can't explain it, but listen, please. calico... calico and rat castle are truly the power couple of making me feel like I'm surfing indieweb for the first time. god...
empty streets. bone skull, dallas, blood rivers, forever. [forever?????????] and blood rivers are largely ambient, though forever much less so. I still think of it as ambient though. bone skull goes in the internet pile because of the ending, and because of the vocal filter. and dallas. these four songs- well I don't know blood rivers that well because I only really listen to it in context of the rest of the album- are the empty streets songs. what do I say about them? well, some of them are a lot like pl songs, dallas is the coelaecanth of lp1 for me. a lot of songs in both the albums really pick up towards the end, when the bright notes come in and there's a little beat change-up. I love that so much. It's so sad that all the recommended artists people name when talking about gleach are mostly pop punk peeps. origami angel is not filling the void.
anyway.
make no mistake, even though I got carried away sorting all the songs, this album is Internet a lot, when you hear bone skull it's black and white ps1 graphic streets, when you hear planetarium it's a special brand of gen z existential dread I associate with late-night blog posts. and yoshi's island, orchids, it feels like a slap in the face, an expression of. well a lot of emotions. but I visualize it as a webpage. the background is red overexposed fire gifs. eyestrain incarnate. I hope you understand.
the aliens in this one are conspiracy aliens by the way. exciting aliens. shit you'd camp out in kansas for.