How to Be a Human Being

How to Be a Human Being is very good at making you like a song first, and only slowly realize that the person in it isn’t doing well. The drums, the bass and the strange sound effects are all very appealing, and Dave Bayley always sings very softly, so a lot of unpleasant things get mixed into the nice-sounding melodies this way.

The characters on this album come from stories heard while traveling and from reworked imagination, each with their own life and their own problems they won’t admit. I like the freedom this way of writing gives the band. The people in the songs can be very boring, very hard to get along with, even a little ridiculous, and the music is still willing to spend a few minutes keeping them company.

As soon as the percussion and low end of Life Itself come out, it is already very distinctive. The rhythm is busy, but the person in the song hasn’t really gotten his life going. He has a certain confidence in his own specialness, and reality keeps tearing it down. Dave doesn’t sing him as a loser for people to laugh at, and there is even a bit of self-satisfaction left in the voice. That refusal to give up completely actually makes the character believable.

Youth then gets light, with flute-like tones and high voices giving the melody a strong bounce. The caring in the lyrics has some distance, though: the speaker hopes the young life lives well, and may not be able to stay by it all the time. It catches very precisely the sadness inside a blessing. The more you hope the other person is happy, the more you can feel that some things can no longer be made up.

The laziness of Season 2 Episode 3 is very specific. The electronic sounds are like prompts from a game console, the beat sits softly in place, and the character’s life is filled with a screen, food and time used up over and over. The production here is clever, and the song itself is so comfortable you almost don’t want to move. You know this kind of standstill is a problem, and you can still understand why he stays there.

Pork Soda is another way of sticking to a person. The bass keeps pushing forward, the chorus is easy to remember, and a few strange images sound close to nonsense. But under these sounds, a relationship is going bad, and one person still insists on holding on to some moment that was once good. I like that it makes memory somewhat unreasonable. What you remember after losing something isn’t necessarily the most meaningful thing; it may just be some inexplicable word.

The mood of Mama’s Gun is much more dangerous. Gentle flute and a floating melody wrap around missing memory, fear and guilt. Dave doesn’t sing the story as especially thrilling, and the listener has to notice that something is wrong on their own. That mismatch between lightness and content is common on this album, but this song uses it with particular restraint.

The rhythm of Cane Shuga leans more toward hip-hop, with sentences kneaded into the beat over and over, and the feeling seems hurried and sticky. The short Premade Sandwiches presses the voice low and squeezes it fast, like a string of consumer wants stuffed in before they could be digested. It really isn’t the most listenable part, but placed in the middle of the album, that sudden roughness is quite useful, pulling the ear away from the overly smooth groove before it.

The Other Side of Paradise is one of my favorites. The synthesizers expand layer by layer, the drums get heavier and heavier, and leaving, success and the person left behind are all pushed farther and farther apart in the same song. The impact of the chorus is strong, but what really holds my attention is that unevenness of information. The one who walked out has new stories, the one who stayed behind can only hear less and less news, and keeps guessing how much place they still have in the other’s life.

Take a Slice magnifies the rougher sounds, the guitar has a dirty texture, and the voice is deliberately sung muddy. It has a pleasure of not caring much what others think. Poplar St puts the guitar in a more obvious position, and the desire, peeking and awkwardness in the story all get tangled up with those repeated phrases. Listening to the second half, you can feel that the band isn’t satisfied with relying only on odd tones to stay fresh.

Agnes comes last and almost changes the impression left by all the songs before it. The characters before had habits, jokes, things worth disliking, and here loss suddenly makes those details precious. The voice tries hard to climb up, the accompaniment gets fuller and fuller, but it always carries the powerlessness of not being able to keep anyone.

I really like that this song didn’t, because of sadness, remove everything of Glass Animals’ original sound. It still has bright synthesizers, a melody easy enough to remember, and is even still good for singing along. But the repeated lines gradually lose their ease here, and sound more like a person who can only come back to the same question again and again.

This album occasionally writes its characters as too vivid, as if everyone must have a strange enough habit to be worth entering a song. But Agnes gives this display of characters a deeper meaning. By the end, what I remember is not only what they eat and what they want, but also that they could disappear from other people’s lives at any moment. And those details that seemed a little funny, I don’t quite have the heart to laugh at anymore.