Life Is Not A Lesson

A Washington, D.C. resident and north-eastern Pennsylvania native, Ned Russin co-fronted Title Fight for many years before the band suspended operations and Ned became Glitterer, releasing his debut album Looking Through The Shades in 2019. “Speckled with synths and/or propelled by a thumping drum machine … It’s a far cry from anything Russin has ever been a part of before,” Stereogum said.

Lyrically, as with the prior album, many of the songs on Life Is Not A Lesson are short, dialectical considerations of the countless daily miniature panic attacks that attend the rigorously examined life. For example, the lyrics of “Are You Sure” – “Feel it in my spine / Certainty is mine / Are you sure?” – combines the tension-building properties of GBV’s “Hot Freaks” with the tension-resolving blast of something like The Pixies’ “Gouge Away”. Life is Not a Lesson proves to be a rigorous reckoning with the life of the mind at a time when there’s not much life outside the mind.

With roomier drums and more electric-guitars-per-square-inch than ever, Life is Not a Lesson has a way of evoking an alternate-universe version of Guided By Voices, one with a hardcore-punk background. And if there was, perhaps, an indirect or “meta” aspect to the pop appeal of Glitterer’s older records, there’s essentially none of that here: this is Glitterer’s most insistently and proudly accessible work.