Dan Whitehouse released his glacial, electronics-heavy opus The Glass Age back in July 2022. Somewhere along the way Dan decided those songs – tender musings on isolation and separation in the era of screens - probably had enough about them to survive a less synthetic treatment.
Hence Reflections On The Glass Age, a mellow acoustic reworking. Can he pull it off? A respectably full Studio One at Dartington has gathered on a chilly spring evening to find out for ourselves.
Dan's support acts are a treat. Local legend India Bourne’s gorgeous The Big Skirts a capella choir is a salve for the senses – a divine bunch swaying in a smiley horseshoe formation. Each song is sublime. I especially adore Hide And Seek, a beautiful Imogen Heap number, originally – India explains – recorded on a kind of synth-vocoder-keyboard thing. Here, obvs, it’s woven purely from graceful human voices. Gloriously in keeping with the tone of the night.
Next up, the lush Billie Marie. Billie also has an EP coming out, and keeps telling us she's nervous, although she doesn’t sound it. After opening with a sweet lament in pacy triple-time she welcomes Ben Roberts to the stage for a side of mellifluous cello. Her songs are delicate and suffused with emotion – one about the moon is particularly affecting, resonant with echoes of faint celestial gravity. Billie's voice is exquisite – possessed of a supple feminine clarity, laced with tasteful ornament.
Everybody scoots over the road to the pub and back just in time for man of the hour Dan Whitehouse. Dan cuts an otherworldly figure in his pale linen suit, box-fresh kicks, ice-blonde hair and dark brows. It’s awesome, I reflect, to attend a show with such clarity of aesthetic – such coherence of vision.
All the songs – each a tidy little gem, succinct and bristling with melody – are about glass. Much of the glass he talks about is in the shape of screens, the screens through which almost all our lives are now mediated. But he’s not here to denigrate screens. Screens are how we collaborate! Screens, moreover, are how he stays in touch with his young son, currently living in Japan.
Glass – such an artificial subject matter – is breathed sensationally into life via Dan’s sonorous Bowie-esque tenor, each tune interspersed with explanations leavened by his hearty Black Country delivery.
“I found my calling on Dudley High Street”, he burrs at one point. The Midlands are fêted in cheery, beery style on a song cycle Voices From The Cones about the ‘cones’ – the now mostly-vanished glassmaking industry of Dan’s old stomping ground.
Instrumentally, Dan glides elegantly between propulsive guitar work and a refined pianistic sensibility that snatches intervals almost out of thin air, like glimpses of sunlight sparked off the fascias of distant skyscrapers. For my money, the songs work better this way.
Dan's penultimate number, Rainbows Never End, is dedicated to his boy, waking up pretty much this very moment on the other side of the world. After the show, Dan tells us, they’ll commune again via screens. What a privilege he has, possessing the skill to express this very modern manifestation of love through his art. An emotive reckoning with the magic of glass, tempered by the dull ache of longing – a music of pane.
Reflections on the Glass Age is released on 28.04.23
Written by Andy Hill
Photos by Phil Sharkey & Katie Whitehouse
As an added bonus, please enjoy a previously unpublished video for ‘The Tide’.