image of A Sunny Day in Glasgow by Flickr user subinev

So, anyone know what happened at the Crocodile to make them all bag-searchy and pat down-y? I’ve noticed over the last year or so that they’ve been paying a lot more attention to what people are hauling in there, but last night was the first time I’ve seen them do things like look under my lip gloss and pat down Josh. Not that I mind, or anything; just curious.

Dreamy noise-pop shoegazers A Sunny Day in Glasgow keep getting lumped in with bands like M83 and Grizzly Bear, and as I watched them play a short set to a sparsely occupied room last night I found myself mulling over why exactly those comparisons are so wrong. And it isn’t that they’re wrong, exactly, since all three bands use layers of instruments and noise to create something deeply colored, and vocals are mostly just another instrument rather than the point. It’s just that they’re rather irrelevant. Live, M83 assaults the audience with sound and lights, and Grizzly Bear spend half of their time on the floor fiddling with things that make noise, forcing me into irritating coping mechanisms [mb], but ASDIG focus on quietly and steadily weaving a spell over their audience. Even one member short–sister Robin had to miss the tour due to some emergency knee surgery–they put together a sound that is somehow all at the same time darkly tender and sometimes clattery and a little creepy. I might not be scared to meet their songs in a dark alley, but I wouldn’t take anything that they offered me.

Pitchfork sort of nailed it when they said, “If those voices in your head decided to start a band, they’d probably sound something like A Sunny Day in Glasgow.”

We’ve covered this before, but it really doesn’t take much for a band to charm me. Arthur & Yu, the first band signed to Jonathan Poneman’s “Hardly Art” label, managed it handily. Grant Olson and Sonya Wescott (formerly of Rogue Wave) recorded most of their debut “In Camera” in Olson’s living room, and live they have the same soft, lo-fi feel. We immediately set about trying to figure out what the band made us think of, and Josh said, “I feel like I should have a picnic blanket.” Which was exactly right: I would feel perfectly at home watching Arthur & Yu on a breezy sunny day, sitting on a red checked blanket, eating sandwiches from Three Girls Bakery, and drinking champagne. Maybe all of that in sepia tone. (We were not the only ones that had this feeling, since some guy felt it strongly enough to come close to the stage and sit on the floor of the Crocodile. Ew.)

Arthur & Yu have a folk sound that is distinctly not folk, possibly because of the muted vocals, occasional melodica, and an outline of droning bass that feels a little too complicated for a simple “folk” label. They won my heart by whistling in one song and having a spare drum for Sonya Wescott to beat on–I’m a sucker for whistling and extra drums strewn around the stage. I distinctly heard a jam block hidden somewhere on the drumset, and at one point a shaker came out to dangle from the hihat.

The crowd seemed open to the concept of an encore, but encores are so last year, and the stage lights came up almost immediately. We walked back out into the restaurant, where I could not stop chastising my friends that had chosen not to come in to see the set. Arthur & Yu have stolen my heart.