Glass Animals
How to Be a Human Being

What do Adele and Primal Scream, Lana Del Rey and Thurston Moore, U2 and FKA Twigs, the latest Paul McCartney and Cee Lo Green have in common? The least common multiple of these and many other names corresponds to the figure of Paul Epworth, the Grammy-winning English producer and songwriter with the aforementioned Adele.

It is Epworth himself who discovers and signs the band in question: the Glass Animals, producing, in 2014, the debut of this quartet of twenty-somethings from Oxford.

Two years later, the Glass Animals release their second album: “How To Be A Human Being.” An album designed to be catchy and easy listening just the right amount, but at the same time consisting of songs that are anything but trivial.

The ten tracks (eleven considering a skit) of “HTBAUB” are covered with a pop sheen and a (perhaps overly) clean production, under which, however, lies a very heterogeneous approach in influences.

It starts with “Life Itself” in which they seem to want to re-propose Battles and their incessant rhythm in a more pop key, also thanks to a killer chorus. “Youth” is, on the other hand, the soft and sweet side of Glass Animals' pop; while in “Season 2 Episode 3,” they play with sounds borrowed from 80s arcade video games to describe the lazy lifestyle of a person “slugglish, lazy, stupid, and unconcerned” (to quote the mother of the good Frank Ocean).

“Pork Soda,” whose title is not a tribute to Primus but to the tattoo of a woman met on tour, describes the story of a homeless person and is centered, coincidentally (hello Les), on a funky bass line. The other mention is in the grotesque orchestration of “Mama’s Gun,” which features a Carpenters sample and whose title, whether intentionally or not, is the same as Erykah Badu's second album.

The second part of the album, despite being less convincing than the first, is far from being a container of fillers. In “Take A Slide,” bass and drums play a central role and recall certain rhythmic solutions of the more rock-oriented Eels. “Poplar St.” starts with a typically Frusciantian guitar riff, while the adrenaline-packed “The Other Side Of Paradise” knows how to wait for the right moment to explode.

“How To Be A Human Being” stands as one of the best pop albums of 2016: a colorful, extroverted, frenetic, multiform, crafty album that blends groove, the dance attitude of LCD Soundsystem, samples, well-chosen refrains, electronics, musical use of singing, seeking of an almost kraut and/or math rhythmicity.