GLOVES INTL

Urban Outfitters premiere of our first single "The End" from the upcoming self-titled album GLOVES Collective.

"Rad slow world music sound to this track. Also, like the Mura Masa track, this one is a nice update to a classic pop R&B sound." - Urban Outfitters

Gloves
Get It Together
A tight 37 minutes of "anti-garage," Get It Together does exactly that for enigmatic outfit Gloves. The locals' sub-genre shifts through multiple, syncopated veins, while never quite settling into any one of them, be it Ghanaian highlife, Parliament-era funk, juke-joint R&B, or riff-driven rock. Influences touch, as water and oil, preferring to stay violently unmixed. "Hot Checks" begins the album-long trend of irregularity, falsely leading you down one road, and then aurally disorienting you into another direction. Body mover "Bobbi & Whitney" forcefully shoves the big pop hook into your ears, while monomaniacal funk single "Black Dress" flips an initially straightforward affair to something more George Clinton. The dissociative "Autobus" features lead vocalist Ajit D'Brass' best vocal performance, soaring over swirling reverb and juxtaposed against a grounded, soulful bassline and beat. Closing on mountain highs, the back end runs with increased mania, the vocals coloring both "Hy-Top" and "Winter Storm Cleon" with percussive lyric drops. This overt insistence on nonconformance continues to the point of frustration – the best kind possible. Get It Together challenges and refuses labeling at every turn.

**** - Austin Chronicle

There’s an indescribable strangeness to Austin’s “anti-garage” outfit Gloves. It’s not the revolting, standing-at-a-distance-and-point sort of peculiarity. It’s more of a, “Where did you come from and why are you here?” alien quality. The one you’re constantly looking for in music, but usually only back up into.

I found them by happenstance, doing a bill preview for a headlining artist a few months ago. It struck me unusual that they were playing to a hip-hop crowd. They ended up cancelling their appearance, but the inclusion, along with other strange lineup concoctions in odd spaces, only added intrigue.

Prior to release of their exceptional debut, Get It Together, I sat down with the band – minus working singer Ajit D’Brass – over plates of smothered pork chops and greens from Roland’s on the Eastside.


Austin Chronicle: You term your sound “anti-garage.”

Colton May: It’s a response to the current state of the Austin music scene. Not specifically Austin music, but it’s just reaction to–

Salem Abukhalil: Things that are trending.

CM: To what’s already going on. “How many garage bands does Austin really need?” was kind of our mantra when we started off. We wanted to create something new.

SA: When we first started playing gigs, the only shows we could get were garage gigs, so it was really thin, this already kind of established scene on the Eastside of Austin. Now we’re realizing that we focus on different things like rhythm, groove. People think garage music isn’t [technical.]

They don’t think “woodshed” – consistently playing in the old-school James Brown vein, where you’ve got to drill if you want to be good. [Austin bands] are our competition. We’re going to play circles around them.

AC: At two white, two brown – Indian and Peruvian-Arab – members, Gloves is obviously a very multi-cultural group. Honestly, I don’t see that a lot in Austin, so that also piqued my interest.

SA: That’s why we’re where we are and really open to different kinds of music – our upbringing. We grew up in a part of Fort Worth that was super fucking racially charged with every kind of race representing the free world. You got everything from punk motherfuckers to podunk white kids, and everything in between.

That constantly affects you growing up. It definitely keeps you more open to other cultural dividends, but the music specifically.

AC: I’m interested in your process. In terms of percentage, how far along is the actual music before you get to the vocals?

Ben Fisseler: One-hundred percent. [All nod in agreement.]

AC: It really gets that far down?

SA: Yeah, because the way we see it, we try to max it out. We think, “How well can we flesh this out to make a good pop tune?”

CM: We write the song good enough where [it stands alone.] There’s enough there right now without vocals because we’ve already we got an interesting top part, the bass and drums, as a unit.

BF: It’s the groove. We got a groove. I mean, in some ways the groove is there and the idea is there, but the structure, we always mess with structure.

SA: We’ll start it, and we try to get that specific groove as interesting as possible in the allotted amount of time. Once we’re happy with it and we’ve given it a stamp of approval, then we’ll add vocals and bounce around ideas.

AC: I’ve asked around, “Does this sound like anything you’re hearing right now?” Everyone says no.

SA: We also have a lot of tricks up our sleeves because a lot of kids our age just don’t listen to [certain bands.] They don’t give it chance. They don’t give Parliament a chance that much anymore. They don’t want to listen to the music that affected those [rock] guys. If you really want to take it seriously, you’ve got to dig.

CM: [We] like to step out of that boundary, so that it pushes us in a different direction. There’s nothing wrong with sticking out like sore thumbs, because then you’re sticking out. - Austin Chronicle

Black turtlenecks, gold chains and an incredibly jazzy sensibility applied to a barrage of harsh guitar noise, moans, cries, and shouts; it’s the shrieks of Tex-Ass’s newest golden boys, GLOVES. If the world has you convinced that Brooklyn, NY is the epicenter of all of the most innovative music coming out right now, then you are at least an idiot if not a full blown neanderthal. If the goal of indie rock these days is so heavy on the image of intellectualism and artistic prowess, then GLOVES hasn’t lived up to the standard, they’ve surpassed it. This isn’t image, this is real.

GLOVES’ debut album entitled Get It Together, to be released on March 3 this year, is a group presenting a fully realized project with power and style. While comparisons are certainly able to be drawn, the subjects of such are so eclectic and spread out that it’s difficult to really pin GLOVES down to one particular style; thank you, nonspecific deity. The guitar playing is sophisticated and powerful, obviously very thought out and executed aggressively but in a very clever mannerism. It brings to my mind the playing of Robert Quine if he were placed in a borderline funk context.

While the album opens with ‘Hot Checks,’ a single-worthy pop flavored art rock track (which I reviewed a video for earlier in Dingus), the album is mostly defined by a unity in sonically pleasing abstraction and an ability to turn repetition into a perfect circle; a power in mystique and the otherworldly presented through the soundtrack to a witch doctor’s house party.

There is a warmth in this record, be that in the pristine smoothness of the vocals or just in the way the all-around feeling presents itself. Perhaps it’s the underlying Texan approach that gives its climate to the music, but whatever it may be, it works.

GLOVES claims not to be a straightforward rock & roll group, but define themselves as “anti-garage”. To go further into what this means, they explain that this is executed through “the use of rock & roll instrumentation to produce music that is not based on popular American/British classic rock sensibilities.” The goal sounds ambitious, but songs like ‘Accra,’ ‘Autobus’ and ‘Running Water’ perfectly exemplify not only exactly what they are saying but, on top of that, a fresh sound in an era that seemingly lacks inspiration much of the time.

This is not the swiping of somebody else’s sound nor a nostalgia-induced throwback to an era passed, but a redefinition of traditionalist rock & roll capabilities in the modern age. Get It Together plays out with a strength in rhythm and sophistication that many could only hope to attain. This cuts away all the bullshit and gets right to the point.

I have seen the future of rock & roll; it is warm, it is strange, and it lives in Texas. @axel_chitlon - DINGUS on Music