The Glands – “So High” & “Electricity”
The Glands were a band that operated on the outskirts of the Athens, Georgia music scene in the late-’90s and early-’00s, back when the Elephant 6 collective was the small city’s most notable musical export. They released two albums, 1996’s Double Thriller and a 2000 self-titled LP.
The band went their separate ways after that — frontman Ross Shapiro opened a record store in Athens for a time — though they got back together in the early ’10s to play a few reunion shows, and there was a promise of new music on the horizon. Shapiro died in 2016, though, from lung cancer, and the rest of the band went about compiling Shapiro’s demos and recordings from the last two decades into a new, final Glands album.
“As a fan of the music and as a fan of Ross, it was a labor of love to get this set out, to get as much of the music out as possible and into the ears of the people who loved him,” the band’s Derek Almstead said in a statement. “A lot of the material came from CD’s he’d give us at band practice, like ‘Here’s some stuff I’m working on.’ It might have the vocals buried or it might not be finished. I found the best versions of the songs and put together a three-CD set, something like sixty songs. We whittled that down to what Double Coda is.”
That new album, Double Coda, is included on a Glands box set called I Can See My House From Here, named after a song on their 2000 album. The set also contains expanded reissues of their first two albums, and a booklet with remembrances from the Shins’ James Mercer, Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood, and David Cross.
Today, we get to hear two new songs from the unreleased album. “So High” is a wiry rocker featuring self-reflective lines like, “I coulda been more/ I shoulda been more/ But I’ll make a comeback/ Everyone’s makin’ a comeback/ It can’t be that hard,” and “Electricity” finds Shapiro experimenting with more electronic elements. Listen to both of them below.
The I Can See My House From Here box set and the rest of the reissues are out 11/9 via New West Records. Pre-order them here.