Premiere: Aaron David Gleason thrashes in glitter on new album, ‘Gilly Leads’

The music industry is violently ill, stricken with an irregular heartbeat. The hallucinatory fever dreams are frightening and tightly bound to the livelihood of thousands of working musicians. In the age of streaming and pivoting to video, an experiment which has all but broken down, really, singers and songwriters are left holding the remnants of their dreams, art suffering under the dull, jagged edge of a silver knife brandished by countless straight white men in suits. You’ve heard the stories; there’s a surplus of anecdotes about someone somewhere being chewed up like half-cooked steak.

Aaron David Gleason, one of those valiant warriors who has combated such toxicity quite enough, has come under brutal punches and stabs through his nearly two-decade career. Once signed to an indie label out of New York City, and later cast aside for the next smorgasbord of shiny objects, he now turns his attention to his expansive songbook, finally having gotten his fingers on the masters. Spanning 17 years, he unleashes four sweaty and sticky albums, each illustrating the depth of his skills and decorated with contrasting strains of alternative rock, glam-pop and sparkling blues grooves. He’s uncompromising, and while his skeleton is mangled and splintered with hairline fractures, his skin is tough, even if a bit swollen in the hypodermis.

With one of his albums, the handsomely psychedelic Gilly Leads, which grabs its name from his former persona, both onstage and off ⏤ inspired by Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust alter-ego, a tune called “Five Years” (in which the icon wails, “Jamming good with weird and gilly”) from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and a town in England named Leeds ⏤ Gleason is a mastermind of the strange and the deliciously spooky. “This is was an attempt to cut everything to the quick. It was immediate, pulpy, poppy, youthful and brash. No rules were adhered to,” he tells B-Sides & Badlands of the record, premiering today. It’s the most spacey and eye-popping of the batch of music, which is issued in full this Friday (January 11). He dresses up in lipstick-stained trouble-making, as he does so on “I Was a Teenage Zombie,” in which he howls as a wolf to the silver moon. “I’ll give you nothing but pain,” he warbles in between funky waves of electronic guitar and fuzzy-headed production sheen. Admittedly, it’s his most Halloween-hued pinnacle on the album, thanks to producer Kennedy‘s (BØRNS, Striking Matches) smart choices. “It’s a bit of horror for your listening pleasure. Kennedy was pushing me to go full crazy on the vocal. I’m sure it’s my craziest vocal on the album,” says Gleason.

“Only Son” erupts with a fit of giggles, laying down the framework for the kind of uninhibited excursion that’ll ignite the insides. The guitar distorts and jounces down the boulevard, but his resentment shimmers in the rosy lamplight along the sidewalk. “I believe you shouldn’t scratch my itch / You’re the one who gets the picture,” he hisses, teetering on the edge of sun-bleached and sandy so-Cal rock of the ’60s. “‘Only Son’ was my way of spilling bile on a recent breakup. She didn’t think I was fun. Me??? Well, in retrospect, at the time, I’m sure she was right. But I wasn’t about to be graceful at this stage in my life,” he says. And with a flourish, Gilly Leads is off and running and ferments as a rather vital artistic achievement.

Gleason is a genuinely daring instigator, and through numerous crystalline, yet blurry, soundscapes, he lays out all his cards on the proverbial tabletop. “Violent Men” is iced with organ-like synths, tossing out a weepy confessional about the ravages that masculinity can have on the psyche. It’s wrought in lo-fi, and Gleason’s delivery is razor-sharp but caves under the two-ton weight of the truth spilling from his pores, exasperated and damaged. “Learning to hold my own against the violent men,” he sings, voice flaking as the synths ascend into hazardous earthquakes. Then, “Over the Edge” is splashed with tambourine and sledge-hammered mirages of mariachi and Bowie grandiose, while “You Belong in the Movies,” a cinematic piece sliced with some of Gleason’s most immediate vocals, feels ripped from an ’80s soundtrack like Back to the Future or Pretty in Pink. In the later half, “For Mike” basks in brevity as a tender interlude dedicated to Gleason’s long-time friend and mentor Mike Garson (Bowie, St. Vincent, The Smashing Pumpkins). It’s a reprieve of the senses and a calculated move to build to the frenzied finale.

“Test” screeches with brassy caterwauls, stretched across more contorted production tricks. “I passed another test, whoa,” he croons, both in lamentation and in a thumb-biting retort to The Man. “This song is really at the core of what Kennedy and I were doing,” notes Gleason. “It’s got a harsh, in-your-face sound and lyrics about being abandoned in Los Angeles. I have a profound love-hate with LA. I’m born and raised there, and I miss the LA of, shall we say, less wealth. LA, in 1989, was kind of cool.”

Gilly Leads, out this Friday alongside three other albums, The Midnight Radio: All Hours, The Midnight Radio: Other Hours and This is Aaron David Gleason, is a tilt-a-whirl of songcraft and unmistakably sees the New Yorker at his most liberated. A mystery man cheekily named Smart Alec fuses suffocating smoke onto “Fire Escape,” and producer Robert Davis lends his talents to “The Front,” a more classically adventurous “angular rocker,” as Gleason puts it. “This one’s about being on the war-front and the fact that that gives you this terrible license to do your worst. Well, superimpose that onto life outside of war ⏤ a lot of people think they have that license, and sometimes I do, too. It’s just another addiction.”

Listen below:

Photo Credit: Michael Crook

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