Great Glass Elevator

Our Hands Turn Into Machines (2007)

Jesse Raub

Remember the first time you heard Radiohead when you were ten-years-old and you were like, "Aw shit son, this mo'fucker is off the hook! It's like deep and stuff! They are like talking about stuff and have weird noises or whatever." Apparently, the dudes in Great Glass Elevator didn't hear Radiohead when they were ten. If they had, maybe they would have gotten bored with it and moved onto Led Zeppelin and started a party band that we could all get into. But instead of songs about squeezing lemons and stairways to heaven, we've got ourselves a philosophical discourse with the opener "Drunk on Another Planet." I know -- sounds like it could be great. But the song's not about slammin' tallboys with Martians. Instead it's about bad falsetto vocals and Shakespearian couplets like "A lot of men say life is precious / A lot of men say live for every moment." Throw down some really cool guitars with like this sort of background reverb thing on them so that they sound cool or something.

But it gets better! Or worse. Um. "The Rapid Eye Movement" has a triangle in the background. And triangles are cool. There are also a lot of boring harmonies that call back to the era of late `90s radio-core alterna-soft rock. And it's also got a chorus that literally just repeats "The eye is upside down." Nope. The eye, actually, is right side up. We just receive every image through a few different lenses so that inside our heads the image is what's actually upside down. The eyeball is right-side up.

In other news, have you ever tried pooping while eating? It's not very easy. It's a clash of ideologies. Pooping is the body ridding itself of waste. Eating is the process that starts it all off. So try taking a hoagie into the stall with you next time you're at work. Sit down on the throne, and take a bite. In a way, this is directly related to the third song called "Our Hands Turn Into Machines." Two words: shit sandwich.

Spinal Tap jokes aside, we close out with "Let's Pretend," as in, "let's pretend that this band didn't steal this song from the Cooper Temple Clause." Or, "let's pretend that this band poisoned themselves with Chinese toothpaste so that we don't have to hear any new material from them until after they get back from the hospital and have a long hard journey of recovery, proving that Colgate can't keep them down. Or shit, maybe we want Colgate to keep them down. Bed-ridden for six months. And while they're there, I'll stop by with Zeppelin I-IV and we'll teach these weenies to party."

In conclusion, I really just wish this band had named themselves the Chocolate Factory, so that we could make jokes about consensual anal sex that this band most likely enjoys with near underage fans. But not the gay kind of anal sex. The kind of anal sex enjoyed by straight dudes who just want to have their genitals immersed in the part of the human body that expels the feces.

Either way, this EP is available to download for free on their website, so go ahead and get it and we can make fun of it together. It's a win-win situation, because the band will feel good about everyone at least listening to this genital wart of an album.