Perhaps you’ve seen this type of performance at your local noise-improv open-mic night: someone plugs in a guitar and goes deedle-deedle-dee on some high notes for a bit before stomping on their Boss DS-1 and letting an open E chord ring out in all its major-key menace. That’s basically what Glitterbust sound like (and you can hear this very manoeuvre on penultimate track The Highline). The difference is that Kim Gordon pretty much invented this brand of salon/gallery noise six-string improv, and her ability to inhabit a performance is unparalleled.
On paper, the project seems similar to Body/Head, Gordon’s recent post-Sonic Youth noise-guitar and vocal-improv duo with Bill Nace. But where that collaboration often finds its power in the counterpoint of Nace’s claustrophobic anti-riffing and Gordon’s voice, Glitterbust revel in the egalitarian harmony of Gordon and Alex Knost, their guitars engaging in a probing dialogue as they trade vocal lines one-for-one. The vocals also sound different from Gordon’s work with Nace, closer to the serene incantatory style of post-Washing Machine Sonic Youth albums like 1998’s A Thousand Leaves and 2000’s NYC Ghosts & Flowers than the narcotic anguish of her singing style during the band’s earlier years. She and Knost seem to possess a shared intuition about the canvas they’re working on, and are unafraid to make a spacious collage that shows its seams and blemishes.
In her 2015 memoir Girl In A Band, Gordon writes that “people pay to see others believe in themselves” onstage. That’s essentially why we go to noise-improv open-mic nights: to see would-be Gordons learning to believe in themselves. Glitterbust is the sound of someone coming out on the other side of that moment, armed with heightened instincts and unfaltering confidence.
Top track: Erotic Resume
