RL Huber - Glass House Architecture

 Released: July 11

Glass House Architecture is an album that I would consider to be a true representation of cinematic as a genre from the very start. The first track, “A Flawed Design,” starts this short film worthy EP off in soft dramatic fashion with a lovely bit of strings that waver between the dark and intense to the light and hopeful. This track really sticks with me throughout the listen for a a couple of reasons. The first simply being that it feels so strangely powerful and emotive, feeling like a tense conflict all its own as it plays out between something that sounds foreboding and something that something that sounds hopeful. Secondly, it later finds an echo in “There Are Patterns,” a track that I think is almost entirely the same with slight adjustments to the arrangement. This gives the entire album this strange cyclical feeling, one that makes you think the whole thing will start over again in a cinematic loop. 

By repeating itself right at the end, it puts everything between these two looping points in an odd context. Especially “Refraction” and “Untethered,” two tracks that bear little resemblance to the swelling of the beginning and ending tracks and take an incredibly minimalist approach in their compositions. They feel like quiet and uneasy scenes unfolding before us, like the calm moments in the interim of tension, giving a wordless exposition to what unfolds in the bookends and the midpoint. The title track, “Glass House Architecture,” feels again eerily similar to the first and last with deep swells and tense keys, making the scene feel once again like a sort of conflict. But what I truly enjoyed about this album is how all of these tracks contribute to that odd and cyclical feeling, like it has all happened before and it will happen again.