Progressive Rock
Glass Hammer release “Black Light” on 6 November and have put out a video for “Lost Horizons” that opens with “I Stared At It Too Long” —the album’s first track— and runs into it without a break.
It is a concept album that Steve Babb, the band’s founder and multi-instrumentalist, wrote from end to end in the months after the surgery. In June he had been diagnosed with a golf-ball-sized meningioma; it was benign and was removed whole.
The story is set in 1979 and the figure at the centre of it is Babb himself at nineteen, pulled into a black-light poster and through to the world on the other side. “Black Light is certainly the most surreal story I’ve attempted,” Babb says. “It’s an origin story, among other things, that tells how all of the Glass Hammer characters from Chronometree’s Tom to Dreaming City’s Skallagrim were brought to life.”
There are ten tracks. The credits list Christopher Galen, Trevor Laake and Olivia Tharpe on vocals, Terran Ligero on guitars, Ken Kristiansen on drums and Oliver Day on acoustic guitar; Babb takes keyboards, bass, percussion and backing vocals.
CDs and hi-res downloads can only be pre-ordered at glasshammer.com. The band has named no label.
Text by Guillem Cardós