I had initially resisted listening to Asian Glow until this year, when the hype became essentially unavoidable. The main reason was their name. For a Korean artist to christen themselves Asian Glow felt somewhat ridiculous and reductive to me, and I didn't want to dignify it. Really, imagine if I started a band and went around calling myself "Celtic Neon," or "White Lumen," or "Western Filament ," or... Actually- all those go pretty hard. Hmm.... kind of wrote myself into a corner here, didn't I? Whatever, the lesson is: never judge a book by its cover. To that point, if there were ever an artist who was more than they appeared on the surface, sonically at least, it would be Asian Glow (known on the street as Shin Gyeongwon). Far beyond any binary or restrictive procedural output, their latest album 11100011 embodies an approach to shoegaze, noise, and emo that drastically exceeds the imagination of their peers, both at home and abroad (except possibly Weatherday, with whom they mingled their talents to make an EP in '22). For example, tracks like "Feel All the Time" are suffused with a heavy sort of electricity that tints the air and discolor it with tension, like the atmosphere on a muggy summer day just before a big storm, it comes pouring out of the speakers like a Biblical flood and there is no way of packing it back in to avoid drowning in its afflicted, neo-romantic discharge- you just have to let it take you. This weighty pulsation of cloudbursting potential is reflected in the pained and unrequited ebb of that track's rhythms and the anguished flow of its lyrics, which seem to usher forth through shellacking eyewalls of composure bracketed by a partially camouflaged, but overall keening disquietude. This cool, phantasmagoric swelter also beautifully binds together the disparate traces of the gothic-leaning "Jitnunkebi (Winter's Song)," securing into a singular continuity a rich, glistening fabric of baroque pop, vampy Italian psychedelics, and tortured third-wave emo grandure into a neon redux of something like the Black Parade. Subtlety isn't necessarily the key to what Asain Glow accomplishes on this album, as much as their triumphs are manifest in the total integration of disparate signifiers, presenting the opportunity for the strange to marry the ordinary in a kismet of cross-pollinated chaos- like when a bounding twinkle-hook takes on the quality of an MBV-esque brainpeeling feedback ripple subsequent to a saturated and smoke-choked Manners-era Passion Pit riff on "Out of Time." Other analogous and admirable amalgamations can be located on none-other-than the title track, where a maladjusted indie groove tarantellas in a stop-start wincing progression as if stumbling through a dancefloor full of thumbtacks while wax sculptures of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser of MGMT burn in the background, as well as the gorgeous conflagration of "Camel8strike," which sounds like Cocteau Twins melding with Team Sleep as they molt and become reborn like a two-headed phoenix in the pit of a haunted and abandoned LA recording studio, set ablaze by faulty wiring coming into contact with a capsized liter of Coca-Cola. There appears to be even more below the surface on 11100011 that I could hope to cover in a review even three times as long as this one is at present. That's alright. If I can pique your interest enough for you to give 11100011 a spin, then I've done my job. The album is a magnificent enigma, waiting in a state of troubled magnanimity to be decoded by an open ear concomitant with an open mind.
