Glasvegas Album Cover - Amazon.com

I care about wordplay. I also care about a band name. Formative case in point, the instant the young Phil learned the proper way to spell beetle, he realized that the band that sang Help to him before bed every night had cleverly altered the spelling of their name to reflect a basic musical idea. Simple, I know, but I remember getting home from school, my heart and stomach about to implode from crushing urgency, and asking the coolest person in the world, “Mom, who else knows about this?”

Luckily, years of schooling didn’t ruin me and I’m still as easy to please as the playfully ignorant kid amused by simple puns. However, years of English and Math classes have made slightly more sophisticated instances of cleverness understandable, and for that I’m thankful. For example, consider a recent IMA acquisition called Möbius Ship, by Tim Hawkinson. Tim’s demonstration of clever wood-play is seriously clever. I like it so much that I hike up to the third floor and check out this monstrous nautical nemesis at least once a week. And, whenever I namedrop hot art at the museum, you know I’m like, “Mobius Ship, get it?”

So, take all that and consider a band from Scotland, with a clever name, that has a song called S.A.D. Light, and whose album cover is a black and white image inspired by Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Point in case, the eponymous Glasvegas album is totally blowing my mind. I mean, these guys and gal from Glasgow are dominating my ears. I’ve spent the last week listening to their perfect poppy-scot-drone-bubblegum tunes at all of my listening stations and wishing they were playing on everything capable of sound reproduction as I travel on each of my daily relocations. Glasvegas, I’m moved.

And Glasvegas, I’m moved not only by your music, which totally rules, but also because of the possibility of a little kid sitting in the back seat of their hip Mom’s Mazda 5 and listening to you wail while they wonder if any of the other kids think the swirly things on your album cover look kind of like music clouds, whatever music clouds are. And then, maybe ten years later, after  feeling a little embarrassed by the surprise of seeing Starry Night in an art text book, that same kid goes home and immediately asks the least cool person in the world, “Mom, why didn’t you tell me about this?

Album in stores.