A Wesley Chung
JJJJ
The Hug and Pint, Glasgow
From Teenage Fanclub to Spinning Coin, there’s a rich tradition of artists from the west of Scotland invoking the jangling harmonic pop sound of a half-imagined, faraway west coast USA. Glasgowbased alt-folk, country and indie-rock singer-songwriter A Wesley Chung has California on his mind too, albeit in a much more literal way.
Neon Coast, the debut album from the native of Long Beach, is a bittersweet long-distance reflection on the feelings of “freedom, lonesomeness and restlessness” that thoughts of home still stir in him from 5000 miles remove. Indeed, being far away from the place he grew up, Chung explained, has helped him to see it more objectively.
A balmy Glasgow summer evening and hot basement venue made the geographic and emotional landscape of his songs – performed with a three-piece band and invoking exponents of plugged-in Americana from Ryan Adams to Wilco – feel all the more vivid. With its shuffling slow beat and softly sighing slide guitar, Neon Coast’s hazy pretty title track pondered LA, and the rivers of joy, grief and shame that flow through a storied city full of desperate dreamers. The country-flavoured Northwoods pondered the sometimes folksiness and noirish strangeness of Long Beach, with its connections to the Midwest that cause it to be known as “Iowa by the sea”.
Chung’s best and most upbeat tune, Restless, twanged and jangled joyously. Closer Oh Death Where Is Your Song – strong hints of Zach Condon’s Beirut about that one – had a mournful, lingering Scottish folk sensibility about it that seemed to find a spiritual connection between his current and former homes. California’s loss is undoubtedly Glasgow’s gain.