Glitterer, solo project of Title Fight’s Ned Russin, plays at Karl Hall in Wilkes-Barre on Aug. 15
From a press release:
It was announced today that Glitterer, the solo project of Title Fight bassist/vocalist Ned Russin, will play a hometown show at Karl Hall in downtown Wilkes-Barre on Thursday, Aug. 15.
The all-ages show will be held about a month after the release of Glitterer’s debut full-length album, “Looking Through the Shades,” on July 12 via Anti- Records. Today, Glitterer released the second single from the album, “1001,” with a new music video, seen below.
Doors at Karl Hall (57B N. Main St., Wilkes-Barre) open at 7:30 p.m., and the show starts at 8 p.m. Ticket prices and opening acts are TBA. This event is BYOB for those 21 and over (with a $5 corkage fee).
Kingston punk/shoegaze band Title Fight rose from local favorites to international fame with three acclaimed studio albums, but in the last few years, the young musicians have taken time off to live life and focus on other projects, playing only sporadic shows like a benefit with Turnstile last year.
Ned Russin branched out in a very different direction in August of 2017 when the eponymous “Glitterer” EP appeared on Bandcamp. To some, Glitterer seemed to manifest the parallel identity, something between an alter-ego and a superego, of Russin, who wrote, sang, and played every note of the EP’s eight songs. The 29-year-old is now a New Yorker after making his name in the Wilkes-Barre music scene and around the world as a member of Title Fight.
“Glitterer” features spartan instrumentation – bass, drum machine, synths, and a familiar voice – and its compositional ethos, such as the listener can grasp, lies in hyper-efficient deployment of discrete harmonic and melodic ideas, also known as verses, choruses, and bridges. The introspective but gnomic lyrics address the kinds of ontological, existential, epistemological, ethical, and moral questions one would expect might occur to a 20-something liberal arts college student (which Russin was, at Columbia University, at the time of “Glitterer’s” release), all while wryly acknowledging the predictability of such heady questions’ arising under such heady conditions.
“Not Glitterer,” a five-song follow-up, appeared eight months later. As is suggested by the antinomic title, the newer EP is even more preoccupied with contemplating the exigencies and implications of regarding oneself and of regarding oneself regarding oneself and, of course, of regarding oneself regarding oneself regarding oneself. And, as with the first record, no song extends a second beyond what’s necessary to deliver the minimally viable aesthetic and intellectual goods. One would be hard-pressed to name an artist that conveyed a higher concentration of stimulation and aural pleasure in 2017 and 2018.
At this point in the story, Glitterer was all but bound to be forced into certain boxes. Here we had what appeared, at a casual glance, to be an erstwhile rock musician’s inevitable solo-electro project, consisting as it did of cleverly written songs whose principal subject was the very self that had conceived them. And this at a time when the most talked-about independent musicians were radically self-involved “SoundCloud rappers,” a time whose zeitgeist, engineered in large part by Silicon Valley’s oligarchs and their data-harvesting social networks, produced and nurtured the most narcissistic individuals in the most narcissistic moment in the history of the most narcissistic society in the history of the world. In this context, Glitterer must be a low or no-stakes novelty exercise in recreational solipsism. Or else one disingenuous man’s cynical bid for a slice of the post-Lil Peep streaming-revenue pie. Or else a bit of self-serious critical-theory cosplay meant to flatter the intellectual vanity of budding coastal elites. Or maybe a toxic mix of all three?
But anyone harboring such suspicions was disabused of them as soon as they saw Glitterer play live during this period. Recordings are plastic objects (in more senses than one) onto which listeners project their biases; a musician who tries to convey vulnerability, earnestness, or self-effacement solely through records is at the mercy of those who would superimpose onto them their own cynicism. (This is, after all the most narcissistic moment in the history of the most narcissistic society in the history of the world.) Live performance is different; a musician who goes out of his way to commune in good faith with people who themselves have gone out of their way to stand together in a room – such a musician is not so easily dismissed. And so it was that, accompanied only by a microphone stand and a Mac laptop perched on a stool like a stand-up comic’s glass of water, Russin performed 42 U.S. shows (including some Wilkes-Barre gigs) from 2017 through 2019, mostly opening for punk and hardcore bands. His dad called it his karaoke act.
But the live show, too, was a contingency, a temporary means to an end that, like the EPs, occluded an essential paradox: Glitterer is a solo project, Glitterer is Ned Russin – but Glitterer is, and has always been, a band.
Hence “Looking Through the Shades,” Glitterer’s full-length debut. Recorded in the cozy carpeted basement of the Russin family home in Kingston and co-produced by indie rock prodigy Alexander Giannascoli and Arthur Rizk (Code Orange, Power Trip, Sumerlands, the 2018 Grammy Awards), the album due out July 12 not only contains Glitterer’s best-yet sonics and songs, it has been constructed in such a way as to evince a spirit – co-operative, semi-schizophrenic, greater than the sum of its parts – that is proper to rock bands and inaccessible to even the least self-involved SoundCloud rappers and bedroom artists.
Simply put, “Looking Through the Shade” is the sound of a group of people playing music, together, in a room. Now we have live drums (Ned’s brother Ben from Title Fight does the honors) and dopamine-releasing fuzzy guitars (Ned’s other brother Alex contributes a solo) to go with the synths, the bass, and the voice. Now we have a 14-song-long thematic arc, carefully sequenced. Meanwhile, the lyrics are still reluctantly but rigorously self-aware, the choruses are still habit-formingly catchy, and the arrangements still carry not an ounce of excess fat.
From the saturated distortion of album opener “The Race” (“I wish I could look at your life and know it’s mine”) through the road-weary “1001” (“I sang 1,000 songs / Didn’t want to sing again”) and the vox-and-bass-only Side B outlier “The News” (“I used to be original”), listeners are invited to join the album’s team of creators in wrestling with the defining psychological and social conditions of our age. And thus we discover that Glitterer invokes solipsism, not to glorify or revel in it, but to understand and rise above it, and that Glitterer knows that no individual can accomplish such a task alone, which is why Glitterer is a rock band and always has been, even when only one person’s name was attached to it.
Glitterer was born in 2017 and now, with “Looking Through the Shades,” Gitterer has come of age. The first single, “Destiny,” was released with an accompanying music video on May 8:
Photo by Angela Owens
