Glissando - With Our Arms Open Wide We March Towards The Burning Sea

Although Glissando’s Elly May Irving and Richard Knox have previously put out a couple of rare CDRs, including the collection brought together in ‘Loves Are Like Empires’, this is their first album proper. Opening instrumental track ‘We Are Depleting’ forms a prelude to the rest of the album. All gorgeous wooziness, it sets the scene perfectly for the equally sumptuous ‘With a Kiss and a Tear’.With an almost mournful piano at the start, the lush, doleful strings eventually take over, and form the perfect foil to Irving’s atmospheric vocals. Her voice is delicate yet arresting, and perfectly suits the mood generated by the Glissando soundscape. At times this is almost deceptively simple: ‘Floods’, for example, initially just consists of Irving’s vocals accompanied by an almost tentative piano. However, those haunting strings surface again, drawing you in, and the track builds and builds until the spellbinding harmonies kick in: “you were on fire as they ran to hold the flames / we did not see / so the water never came”.

‘White Silence and the Fragile Reality’ is haunting and mesmeric; again, it’s effectively just Irving’s voice with a piano accompaniment. ‘Goodbye Red Rose! This Was Not For You’ has a more experimental feel, with its spoken word vocal. ‘Always the Storm’ is almost dreamlike, with its initial tinkling and eerie, sampled voices, which give it a curiously filmic quality. Indeed, you can imagine the whole album being used as a film soundtrack. ‘Grekken’ is another flawless example; with its complex harmonies, it utilises the deep baritone voice of David Martin from fellow Leeds-based band iLiKETRAiNS to great effect.

And therein lies one of Glissando’s strengths. Although officially a duo, there’s a real feeling that ‘With Our Arms Wide Open…’ is a collaborative effort, with contributors from bands including iLiKETRAiNS, Held By Hands and Gizeh labelmates Her Name Is Calla. However, they also very much have their own sound, aided by the distinctive voice of Irving. Overall, there’s a lush, poetic feel to the album: even the song titles read like lines from an epic saga. By turns achingly beautiful and curiously powerful, it’s very much an album to be savoured, allowing its quiet pleasures to envelop you, rather than expecting it to give up all its secrets in one go.

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