A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s Sea When Absent is their most reined-in album yet — an impressive feat considering it was written largely over email by six people who kept living their disparate lives in various time zones. For a band as unbound as ASDIG, a “clarified” sound means slightly more discernible vocals and a faint sense of logic running through the shoegaze clamor.
On the No Death EP, a five-song bonus release accompanying ASDIG’s new album, Ice Choir (a.k.a. Kurt Feldman, ex-drummer of the Pains of Being Pure at Heart) remixes opening track “Bye Bye Big Ocean (The End).” The original cut blasts off with amorphous guitar noise and then drops off of a cliff into a pretty falsetto-harmony sequence, skipping between moods as it pleases. Feldman’s reworking pulls a single thread out of the ASDIG plasma and gives it a crisp, retro-synth gloss. The lyrics get a ‘gaze-free spotlight, and are suddenly sing-along-worthy: “Had this dream about you / An endless dream about you.”
Stream Ice Choir’s remix of “Bye Bye Big Ocean (The End)” below.
