I Love You So F***ing Much

The most obvious change on this album is that the songs have gotten bigger. The choruses have to climb very high, the synthesizers are spread wide, and the drums are more direct. Before, Glass Animals would use some strange little sounds to draw attention to the corners; this time a lot of things gather around the most eye-catching melody. It sounds smooth, and the memorable parts come quickly.

But sometimes I miss those corners. The characters in How to Be a Human Being each had their own faults, and the sound changed along with them, while this album mostly revolves around love and intimate relationships. The theme isn’t narrow, but the people in the ten songs occasionally have tones that are too similar, like one thought at several different brightnesses.

The opening of Show Pony is very appealing. Love is put back into family relationships, and how a person treats intimacy later may have been partly learned from adults long ago. Dave’s singing is light, but the melody has some insistence, and when the chorus comes back again and again, those seemingly ordinary ways of getting along also show their constraints. I like that this song doesn’t rush to blame everything on some bad person; how a relationship is maintained, and how it slowly wears down, is often harder to explain.

whatthehellishappening? writes the situation as absurd, as if being wrapped up in something out of control and somehow feeling a bit of excitement. The kidnapping setup is used to magnify this contradiction, and the song itself has a strong sense of speed. It is one of the songs on this album closest to the old Glass Animals, still willing to let humor and unease squeeze together.

Creatures in Heaven fully believes in the power of a good chorus. The voice climbs, the accompaniment opens up with it, and a certain night in memory is enlarged again and again. Dave is very good at singing this kind of intimacy that is already over while the body still remembers. The song has no very complicated turns, but the melody can really bear repetition, and as you listen you’ll want to sing along.

Wonderful Nothing is my favorite part. The opening is held back and slow, and when the low end really comes in, the whole song’s expression changes. The electronic sounds have rougher edges, the rhythm is willing to stop and swerve, and the spite in the voice finally has a sound to match. It has the feeling of having already won the argument out loud and still feeling uneasy inside. Compared with several songs that keep saying they miss someone, this kind of not very likable feeling seems fresher to me.

A Tear in Space (Airlock) pulls the sound into a more closed space again. The high voices and breath-like rhythm make the sense of being squeezed in the relationship easy to hear. The space setting is used fairly well here; distance, air and weightlessness can all map onto the state of two people being together, without needing much more explanation. It’s just that after the chorus comes back a few times, the arrangement changes only a little, and the tension at the start gets worn down a bit.

The feeling in I Can’t Make You Fall in Love Again is more direct. The title has already said the hardest thing to accept, and the remaining time is spent slowly digesting it. I like that Dave doesn’t sing especially strongly the whole way; his voice still lifts upward, still seems to be testing whether there is another possibility. Between knowing a truth and actually being able to live by it, there is always a stretch of time.

How I Learned to Love the Bomb writes about unpredictability in a relationship. The other person’s changes make you nervous, and you gradually learn to wait, to watch, even to treat this nervousness as part of getting along. The melody makes it easy to follow along, and only when you listen closely to the content do you realize that familiar doesn’t necessarily mean safe. This is one of the few places on the album where I feel the pleasantness really adds weight to the theme.

The melody of White Roses is sweet too, but by here, several familiar treatments start to feel crowded. Entering softly, gradually lifting, then letting synthesizers and drums push the chorus open: these have already been used quite a few times before. Taken on its own it isn’t bad, but placed in the whole album, its personality is weaker. I don’t mind a band writing big pop songs, I just hope different relationships would bring more different musical responses.

On the Run picks up the pace again, and repetition gives running away the momentum of not being able to stop. The last song, Lost in the Ocean, relaxes the sound, and the plainer accompaniment with harmonies gradually joining lets the person who has been floating in a huge space finally come close to the ground. The ending isn’t especially surprising, but it is necessary, and the ears also need a rest from the brightly lit production before.

I Love You So F***ing Much doesn’t lack good songs. I like that it is willing to sing feelings directly, and I also like that moment in Wonderful Nothing when it suddenly shows its teeth. It’s just that once so many sounds are made to look so pretty, the differences between the characters get smaller too. For me, what is most worth keeping from this album is still those parts that are a little out of control and not very smooth.