Send "Glasser " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Remember that eMusic Selected + Collected comp from back in early 2009? Basically a rundown of hot new acts at the time, turns out the thing was pretty farsighted-- more than a couple of the bands it featured (Girls, Salem) went on to find big audiences. It was also the first time many of us heard Cameron Mesirow aka Glasser, whose track "Apply" was one of the disc's standouts. Back then Glasser was a solo project-- just Mesirow singing over GarageBand beats-- but the song had a great mix of electronic drag and skyward pop, and showcased Mesirow's impressive vocal range.Fast-forward almost two years later and it seems like the kind of music Glasser makes-- sort of quasi-mystical, swirling electro-pop-- has become a lot more popular. On the indie side you've got Bat for Lashes (Glasser's closest sonic relative), Zola Jesus, and Fever Ray, as well as Florence and the Machine threatening to break big in the mainstream. So the timing's definitely right for Glasser's full-length, and with Ring she's enlisted the help of producers Van Rivers and the Subliminal Kid to help flesh out her sound. Tracks are still based on Mesirow's early sketches, but now they've got more weight and sheen. There isn't an easy descriptor for Glasser's sound-- she incorporates bits of tropical pop, tribal percussion, and a couple of different strains of electronic music. Her songs sidestep traditionally linear arrangements for a more open, circular approach-- they kind of swoosh around without pausing at verse-chorus intersections. Interesting as this is, the main draw of Mesirow's music is her voice-- warm and flexible, she can bend it to suit different moods and tempos. Ring's best tracks, like "Home" and "Glad", create space for her vocals to soar. In "Apply", which gets an update here, heavy tribal percussion and grinding synths give way to a sunny refrain where she just bursts into the upper register....full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| I don’t know if my fellow TMTers chuckled or just ignored me when I inquired if we could include Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” slowed down 800% in our year-end ballots. Of course, there’re all the usual questions about authordom and ownership and blah blah blah that really ought to be getting more complicated by now. But my interest is in how, even with the crappiest Disney-pop, listeners across the board will blithely swallow some of the most staggeringly compressed lushness that pop music has ever known. The slow version is proof, even a coefficient if that’s your thing, that arrangement density is exponentiating: a few seconds of Bieber (and a hell of a lot of music our crew likes, I hasten to add) literally contains all the majesty of a pretty darn good Sigur Rós song. The music of 2000 sounds pretty tantric by comparison. And anyone old enough to have been swept up in the ornate neo-psych of the mid- to late-90s now has a right to feel a little ripped off by their nostalgia. All of which is to suppose how Glasser’s debut LP, Ring, sounds beautiful, complex, intricate, and so on, and yet fails to actualize her. We’ve seen a dense scribble across the Dido-Björk binary in the last decade, and for a lot of listeners and suits, the million-dollar question still plots Cameron Mesirow somewhere in that scribble: How many brownie points does she get for those coin-guzzling “wops” in the opener? Have we really had enough of pentatonic plucks? Is she an eccentric? I’m afraid that she isn’t, but there’s enough going on in these songs to spot both chaff and wheat. The sudden vocoder in “Mirrorage,” the laziest tribal simulacrum of the last 10 minutes in “Plane Temp”: these are dolloped in poor taste. But I dig “Clamour’s” little alternating free-jazz blats, sounding like someone playing “Can Can” with Magic Band marionettes tied to their fingers. An unabashed midi barbershop quartet named “Glad” serenades without overstaying its welcome. This may sound hit-or-miss, but none of these elements end up interfering with or canceling out any other; they just pile up. Her emphasis on Garageband’s role in the Apply EP was charming, but that shtick is moot now. Her whole aesthetic is more or less likable: loopy, ethereal, lush....full text |
| Bbc |
| There really are some weird women out there right now. If it’s not Natasha Khan (aka Bat For Lashes) writing an entire album about her blonde alter-ego inspired by David Lynch’s fascination with transvestites, it’s Fever Ray’s Karin Dreijer Andersson dressing her band like a gang of melted Mrs Doubtfires, and herself like a chess board. Enter Glasser, otherwise known as Cameron Mesirow. Stylistically not as outrageous as her contemporaries, in the past the LA native has wrestled with sleep paralyses on a nightly basis and, as a child, night terrors where she’d be haunted by foul hallucinations during her waking hours. Which can’t have been much fun, but sure makes for a warped imagination. Unsurprisingly this, her debut album following last year’s acclaimed EP Apply, doesn’t sound like KT Tunstall. Rather, it’s a wide-eyed, tribal, multi-textured menagerie of a record which conjures the airy serenity of an undiscovered rainforest and thrill of discovery in one soft breath. All very peaceful. Opener Apply is a languid, snaky, percussive highlight which darts from side to side like Björk on a slalom. Home, T and Plane Temp are all equally as hypnotic, controlling and deep. Glad is almost TV on the Radio-esque with stabs of trumpets and horns. It’s quite a feat considering Mesirow and her laptop edition of GarageBand were, in large, the sole architects of the record. Although by the time you reach track eight of nine, Treasury of We, her consistency in sound does begin to weaken, her gentle weaving of Kate Bush and Lykke Li still grasps the attention....full text |
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