Little Wings - High On The Glade (2024) [Hi-Res]

Perpetual Doom is proud to present the latest full-length album from Little Wings: High on the Glade. Kyle Field, the Golden State’s mercurial troubadour, is back with a vengeance—songs of vaudeville and villainy, renewal and rebirth.

Open all the doors and windows, let the air out and the spirits in. That is the ritual that Field developed between takes at the Dry Gulch Ranch in Malibu, California, the old set of Gilligan’s Island where the S.S. Minnow still lies wrecked on the cracked earth. This observance, like taking a long, deep breath after holding it again, felt necessary. With a Fall breeze blowing in over distant vistas and Camarillo State Hospital merely miles away, the atmosphere was tense. Engineer Kyle Mullarky had only a half hours’ worth of tape to capture ten songs, and Field aimed to get it all down in an afternoon. But constraints of this kind can also be a creative blessing. There’s a reason Field chose to record on tape: in his words, “Limitations make me chuffed, it lit me up.”

In the case of what would become High on the Glade, those attending spirits urged him to play faster. Little Wings has made its reputation on West Coast folk that ambles at a wanderer’s pace, but Field took to playing his new tunes slightly allegro, quickening his leisurely strum into a lively, Gaelic air. Indeed, Field thinks of this as being his most Irish record, full of heartbreak and violence. It is a fitting description for tracks like “Brutal North Pillow” and “Squire’s Locker,” which evoke a long tradition of mud-splattered balladry from 18th century tales of bandits and rovers to The Pogues’ down-on-their-luck romantics.

The characters Field embodies on this album share his distinctive eye for comic detail, but they are not afraid of exploring the underside of a dark age. Take the buccaneer narrator of “Squire’s Locker,” who tells us that “to run a man through to the base of a sword, and watch his eyes bulge, is a pleasure.” There is a bitter sense of justice running through this Roger’s account, a desire to get back at the idle and comfortable, the “Lord Fontleroys” hoarding the world’s Treasure. Much of the album explores the uneasiness that comes with living through a decadent era, what Field describes as kind of new Roaring Twenties, a farcical return to a Digital Jazz Age. Even the less bloodthirsty perspectives on the album share this conviction: album opener “Bubbles Go Pop” details a raucous party where the “laughter doesn’t stop” although the “bums upon the lam are slight and poor” even as the sing-song melody, evocative of so many classic Little Wings tunes, becomes buried in a chaotic bed of percussive noise.

After a day of drums and percussion, Field airlifted the recording to Jonny Kosmo’s compound to add additional flourishes. The album, mixed by Bongwater’s Kramer, resonates with unexpected collisions of sound. If it is Field’s plaintive voice that still defines Little Wings, he sounds less alone than ever. Kramer surrounds him with a pocket-sized orchestra to match the diverse landscapes that the lyrics evoke. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than on the stunning album closer “Goatshead Soup,” where lush strings add a sweeping and tender touch to Field’s account of a Satanic neighborhood poisoning. This track, a haunting and darkly humorous murder ballad, pushes Little Wings into undiscovered territory. It helps define High on the Glade as somewhere between the new and the old—a record of rebirth. A chance to clear the air.