AND THE GLASS HANDED KITES

"And the Glass Handed Kites" (AtGHK) is characterized by a strange balance between opposing elements such as complexity-simplicity, beauty-uglyness, epicness-minimalism, and catchiness-quirkiness. They manage to combine complex time signatures with catchy sing-along-friendly melodies and the general structure of both the individual tunes and the entire album is really rather unusual. Most of the compositions on AtGHK transition into oneanother giving the impression of constituting a suite.

Several track contains some compositional twists that lead the listener into thinking that a new song has started, and example is the las part of "Apocalypso", which sounds like an entire new song, before the transition into "Special". "A Dark Design" transitions into "Saviors of Jazz Ballet (Fear Me, December)", which changes character several times changing between pompuousness to ambient minimalism before transitioning into the dramaticically opening "A Envoy to the Open Fields", which carries on the dynamic pattern, spicing it up with simple chord progressions distributed over complex time signature patterns. It is very clear that the boys in Mew have a very consciently artistic approach to their music, which works very well.

AtGHK is a very dynamic, but well balanced, complex album with a generally symphonic feel and, to me, not just prog-related but an example of truly progressive and artistic rock music.

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