One of the more truly odd releases that I've heard lately, Glossolalia is the first solo album from Blaine Reininger in almost a decade. A founding member of the cult band Tuxedomoon, Reininger has been making music for almost three decades now, and this newest, twelve-track effort mixes styles like it's going out of style, resulting in a hodge-podge of music that combines everything from hard glam-rock to noise-laced spoken word and everything in-between.
As the title suggests, this is a release obsessed with the sound of vocals and any other noises made with the mouth, and in that respect it doesn't disappoint. "Throatsinging" opens things with a preacher-style rantings over mellow electric guitars and organ before weird, guttural growls and groans take it someplace completely different. "Glossolalia" drifts through a half-remembered ambience of field-recordings and haze before locking into an almost adult contemporary rock track on some sort of hallucinogens.
The rest of the album is just as unpredictable, with forays into all kinds of strange realms. "Lemonaki" finds more spoken-word style samples playing out over quivering string arrangements female vocals loops, while "Cowboy Elektra" and "Drippy" play things a little more safely, slurping through largely-instrumental mid-tempo pieces that combine trip-hop style beats and programming touches of bluesy guitar and slurpy percussion. If that weren't enough, "Ich Will Musik" rambles through about two minutes of repetitive industrial pop that feels far longer than it should.
While there are some charming moments on Glossolalia, they're largely offset by completely head-scratcing parts that completely break the momentum. "Lunar Rose Oubliette" is a perfect example, bursting forth with a sort of madcap cartoon violence beat, but is soon derailed by unnecessarily murky breakdowns that mingle old timey rock loops with over-the-top filtered vocals with completely random lyrics. Basically, this twelve-track release is largely a mess, but fans of his long-time group might want to check it out anyway just to keep up with what he's been up to.
