Glassjaw
Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Silence

THE REVIEW

Pure Misogyny.

These words might best describe the album in question, but I won't dwell so little; instead, I will dig deeper and more specifically.

It is the year 2000, and various bands like Limp Bizkit, Korn, Incubus have enormous success with their new-metal. Roadrunner, as a response, decides to sign on a decidedly offbeat group (most of their roster in those years was predominantly metal...) with the rather extravagant name Glassjaw.

The band is very young and features as vocalist a spectacled, skinny, awkward-looking young guy. Daryl Palumbo with his group records an album with strong emotional hues but of post-hardcore lineage.
It is titled as best as this kind of CD could be titled “Everything you ever wanted to know about the silence”. Schizophrenia and melody go hand in hand on the same album and more often in the same song.

There isn't a song, and I mean not one, in which Palumbo (who in the following years will be considered one of the best singers) does not "attack" women, girls, and the stories had with them. The lyrics are probably the best part of the album. In truth, one would have to go and read them because often they are not very understandable. The music, however, is truly great, as is indeed the singing.

“Siberian Kiss”, the first single, is one of the album's strongest tracks in which good Daryl in the chorus says, "I keep you jealously inside me, in a photo shaped like a kiss, a kiss shaped like a bullet." Right after comes another song that made Glassjaw history and is still performed live today; that is "When One Eight Become Two Zeros" in which Palumbo lets go into a sharp phrase, "you're not another woman, you're another, another pastime for a boy like me." Follow the punk of “Ry Ry's Song” and another historic song, “Lovebites and Razorlines,” in which our hero constantly says in the song, "do you want to fuck me now? You fucking whore." Among the other songs worth noting are definitely the slow “Her Middle Name Was Boom” and “Piano.”

While the last two tracks deserve a few more words. Namely, the title track, a stunning 5-minute and 37-second ride alternating whispered parts with inhuman screams. This is probably the track that best translates in music what Glassjaw is, and the lyrics, as always, are of unique beauty. The closing track and another gem of the album is “Motel of the White Locust,” also beautiful, where Daryl says, "who could ever, who the fuck could ever take my place?"

Finally, watch out for the ghost track entitled “Losten,” a poignant piece played entirely on the piano in which Palumbo seems to want to make peace with his demons, but just when it seems that it is so, he lets go of the last verse in which he says, "Now I know I want you, I know you are listening, this is my chance to tell you everything, my only chance to tell you "I Love You" but I waited too long, the recordings are over."

Two years later and with the same producer (Ross Robinson) but with a different record label (from Roadrunner to Warner), Glassjaw will release “Worship And Tribute.” Due to the illness Palumbo has always suffered from, the rare Crohn's disease, the group will stop, fueling gossip that Glassjaw had broken up. This is not so, and among the countless side projects of the members (among other things, Daryl also dabbles as a DJ...) a new official album of the band could come out around mid-2008.

We will wait impatiently, hoping to hear yet another masterpiece from the jaws of glass.