W.S. Walcott Medicine Show

No Need To Be Lonely -Gladie (Get Better Records)

“Push Me Down”, the opening track on Gladie’s latest LP, No Need To Be Lonely starts off with just a single lo-fi guitar strum as Augusta Koch sings the lines “it keeps me humble, it keeps me weighted” before the 30nsecond mark when the rest of the band thunders in with bombastic drum rolls and cacaphonous guitar riffs while Koch sings out “I know its hard, I’m just like you, I have bad days too but I still feel the stuff”. And just like that, we are introduced to the principle theme of what just might be Gladie’s best work yet.

As Gus. herself has explained, “A lot of the things I was thinking about while writing the lyrics for these songs were relationships. The ones we have with people in our lives, ourselves, and the world we live in. All of those different types of relationships, while beautiful, can also be hard as hell sometimes. A big antidote for that struggle and isolation to me is encouragement”.

Life can be fucked for so many of us especially these days, and No Need To Be Lonely offers up a primer on how to fight off the doldrums, the loneliness, the feelings of isolation and most of all the emotions of helplessness. With subject matter dealing with such heavy themes, one might expect that the LP might be too maudlin and meloncholy but that is anything but the case. After the band had reched out to Jeff Rosenstock to bounce some ideas off of, Jeff immediatly offered his services and as such was brought on to produce the album. Not surprisingly, Jeff’s accute, sense for music, particularly hard driving anthemic punk rock music was the perfect prescription for a banger of an album which under all the booming music delves into some very serious subject matter.

No Need To Be Lonely is quite honestly a superb album. It’s the album that I had hoped that Koch still had in her when she and her bandmates in Cayatana disbanded. Don’t get me wrong, Gladie’s previous albums were terrific. I absolutely loved You Don’t Know You’re In Until You’re Out as well as Orange Peels but this new collection hits all the right spots for me. Gladie, with this effort has managed to nail it in all facets of creating a beautiful rock and roll piece of art. As Koch laments on what is [ossibly the most heartfelt and emotional song of the album, “Fix Her”, “I wanted you to know the beauty had a purpose”…well Augusta and the rest of Gladie certainly created a thing of beauty with this album. And indeed if you dig deep into the lyrics, it is quite obvious that there is a significant purpose to these songs, life may be hard and we might all struggle with it but we’re all in it together and together we just might get through it.