MP3 Review: Hot Glew "May I Come In?"

[$5 to Download // https://hotglew.bandcamp.com/]

"May I Come In?" is a collection of ten moderately paced and moderately timed songs.   No song is too long nor too short, too fast nor too slow.   This pace is set when the second track (the first is an intro of sorts) brings about it's slower, mellow type of rock sound that falls somewhere between Lou Reed and Urge Overkill but with vocals not nearly as on the side of bass but almost like Pink Floyd singing about being another bring in the wall.    We then begin to walk through the desert, as "Thinking Small" makes me think of that song about going through the desert on a horse without a name, EFS and something else I would later place as The Get Up Kids' "Walking On a Wire" (Which, really, for me, is the only Get Up Kids album out there [Sorry, "Mass Pike" song])

It's slow and somewhat melodic, yet brooding overall so I'm digging the vibes it's sending off.   When you have something that wants to be in a particular genre such as ending in -wave or -gaze you can simply throw the word "chill" in front of it, but can you do that with rock also?   Is there a chill rock genre?  Is Hot Glew making it so that there is one?  I'm not sure because I don't like genre names in general but if you asked me to give you one here I might try and create chill rock if such a thing didn't already exist and wasn't flooded by artists who sounded more like new age than anything good.

Through the slow pace comes a bit of the sound of depression.   It's not easy to describe this, but when you're depressed you just don't want to do anything and tend to move at that slower pace which I can hear on these songs.   In that way it can sound borderline goth or whatever you would consider bands like The Smiths and The Cure to be but it's not completely sounding like them so you don't have to dress in all black and wear black eyeliner so I'm definitely pleased with that.  

I can imagine these songs being played on one of those big acoustic guitars that can be plugged in and then by the fourth song I begin to hear hints of Modest Mouse in the way that there are steady waves behind the other instruments and higher pitched synth loops as well.    "Lucid" is a nice instrumental song that reminds me of Santana with some new wave bits and then after that there are drums I really like on "Moving So Long" which bring about that new wave feel once again and I'm beginning to think that this was not yet released on cassette but there's still time and it should be.

The vocals can feel distant, as if recorded in a large room, and then on "Desert" (Which I didn't even think about as a song title when I wrote down initial notes about "Thinking Small") there is a trumpet which makes it sound somewhat like jazz but also there is this mix of Cake and Fastball, but maybe also just a lot of Fastball (or at least what most people know them for based upon that one song)   Final moments of the album leave me thinking of Sparklehorse, which is never a bad feeling or comparison to make for me.

Within the title itself is a question and the very fact that it has to be asked either shows a certain sense of self-doubt or it could also just be attributed to a vampire (You have to invite them in, people!)   On one hand, I think about times when people like police officers show up to your door and take you by surprise so you don't invite them in to talk so they have to ask this titular question.   Yet, it still brings that general idea of someone being on your doorstep who feels so insignificant that they are not invited in but instead have to be bothered to actually ask the person.    It's so much the opposite of this album though because there is nothing intrusive about it and you don't need to answer any questions when listening to it because you should instantly fall in love with it.