It‰’s almost inevitable that discussion of The Glow Pt. 2 will involve some sort of comparison to Neutral Milk Hotel‰’s In The Aeroplane Over the Sea. The comparison works on a very superficial level, but to equate the two as sister albums is to do both a disservice. The only bloodline that they share is how they play with texture in a “lo-fi‰” way. Both albums transition almost dichotomously between acoustic, folk colors and fuzz or distortion or whatever you want to call the loud parts. The albums are actually very different creations, but hide behind the mask of texture.

The Glow Pt. 2 isn‰’t satisfied with allowing one chord dictate the entire motion of its melody. Instead of presenting one chord and one simply melodic structure, Phil Elverum chooses all paths at once. Any moment of the album is buzzing with acoustic guitars playing different melodies, each panned to a different direction. It makes for a fantastic headphone album, but the real magic is how you can listen to any song as the singularity of its melody, or as the infinite directions that each voice pulls the focus on.

Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum and Elverum are both searching for these places that represent happiness to them. Mangum’s is a girl that has long perished, and his end goal is a time where she still exists. Elverum lusts after the same environment of self-discovery and love, but his are encapsulated in various places. While Mangum really wants to get back to his utopia, Elverum values the nostalgia, and you get the impression that these places that were once beautiful to him because of a girl or himself are now tainted somehow. His reason for revisiting these places are only to reconsider all the memories tied to them, not to find anything that the place hasn‰’t already granted him. This theme is best summarized when Elverum sings, “My eyes narrow towards a light, a place where we hotly radiate, and things aren’t concrete there and we fastly glide.”

I‰’d go as far as to say that this album is standard-listening in the same way that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is. The Glow Pt. 2 takes the idea of simplistic melodic resolution and paints it in fractured pieces that ebb and flow in a way that lets the songs morph that a simple chord change doesn‰’t. Elverum‰’s emotional pull to these ideas that are now ruined with nostalgia is satisfied by his melody‰’s indecisiveness. The Glow Pt. 2 represents how memories can be beautiful and disgusting, depending on what light you look at them in.