Stream: Wages, ‘Glace’ (full album)

2
Wages
Wages

Wages’ new album “Glace” lives up to its name — it’s polished and luminous no matter which side you’re listening to. And it does have sides; in fact, “Glace” has a split personality, though we wouldn’t call it a disorder. The band (Nick Byron Campbell, James DeDakis, Dustin Robles and Matt Rumley) released two outstanding EPs in 2015, showing on the second, November’s “Sacre Coeur,” that they could out-indie-rock the best of indie-rockers. It was a surprise, given Wages’ predisposition for cinematic and often experimental art-rock, a tack that has seen the band mount sound art installations at venues such as the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock and Machine Project. The cathartic songs on “Sacre Coeur” account for the first half of “Glace,” before the album segues into stunning and often chilling ambient rock explorations. “Gotta” sparkles like sunlight off a mountain lake, and the glacial meditation “All Gone” patiently unfolds over a groaning synth, arriving at a sky-high chorus. Wages are possibly the only band who could draw comparisons to Band of Horses and Sigur Ros on the same album, and both them be right. So rock out to tracks 1 through 5 and beam yourself to another dimension with the final six songs and see if you can achieve, as Campbelll sings in the closer, “Super Perfect Dreams.” “Glace” is out Friday.

||| Stream: “Glace”

||| Previously: “Rattlesnake,” “L’oeil” EP, “Pull Through”