VIDEO PREMIERE: Adrian Glynn’s ‘Guardian’ Juxtaposes Beauty & Grotesque

This past year saw Vancouver-based artist Adrian Glynn quietly showing his dark side; portraying first a soldier in Leonardo DiCaprio’s nightmares for The Revenant and then a gruesome, villain in the series, Arrow. On his sophomore solo record release morelightthannolight, (released 10/14/16) Glynn finds a light in the dark and ultimately a voice all his own.

For this first solo venture since 2011’s critically acclaimed Bruise, Glynn took his first attempts at synthesized demos to his friends, Canadian indie heroes, The Zolas. Zach Gray and Tom Dobrzanski were intrigued by Glynn’s new electro-lite forays and excited by the prospect of producing another artist’s record for the first time. At a rainy cabin on BC’s Sunshine Coast, they decided to make an album together

The album plays off of its title both lyrically and musically, exploring the interplay between acoustic and synthetic instruments, between the neon of cityscapes and the creaks in ours walls. morelightthannolight isn’t a folk album, it isn’t indie or pop. It finds a voice of its own, somewhere between the shadow and the light.

Glide is premiering the video for the stark orchestral “Guardian” off morelightthannolight (below), a composition not unlike any of Sufjan Stevens’ more intensely tender and introspective jewels. The video displays a kind of poetry in the juxtapostion of the beautiful and the grotesque. the serene and the horrifying, which pairs well with the aching themes of the song which move from haunting to melodious with scant warning. In the end, it’s hard to know who we feel more sorry for–the buried, or those who bury.

“This is one of the darker songs I’ve written. It’s from the point of view of a man’s guardian angel and the guardian no longer knows how to help his ward, “says Glynn. “I think when people get truly down they go so far inside themselves that they feel literally no-one can reach them anymore, even the ones that understand them the best. It’s a desperate place to be and we all have someone we love who is living with that weight every day, even if we don’t know it.”