REVIEW: Glitter — Pretend Love (SINGLE)
Dallas, Texas based Glitter began her professional musical journey originally as Glitter Rose, southern rocker, but “Pretend Love” continues heralding a pronounced change in her songwriting perspective. Shepherded by producers John Dufilho and Salim Nourallah, she’s reoriented herself in a poppier direction, albeit still working with a traditional band configuration and with a sharper singer/songwriter slant than ever. There is a generous amount of humor in her latest single, as well, though it never goes overboard.
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“Pretend Love” works well within a particular songwriting tradition. The track is, essentially, a kiss-off song about attempting to jettison someone lovesick whose protestations of love are becoming wearisome, if not even a little creepy. Glitter does an excellent job of depicting this scenario in a non-threatening way; the song’s subject isn’t looming outside of her home at night but, instead, dragging her down emotionally and making themselves look bad.
As such, it is not looking to make any sort of major statement about life and the world, obviously, but it’s musically on point without fail. The light guitar contributions present throughout the song provide an appropriate melodic counterpoint to Glitter’s own voice. It sounds thin, at first, even impossibly so, but attentive listeners will understand more and more as the song develops that it’s a bit of musical sleight of hand.
She is a canny user of her vocal instrument. Glitter, in essence, is creating a character with her vocal performance. She perfectly calibrates her voice to work with the musical backing rather than attempting to impose her will on it and modulates it at all the right points. Glitter is careful to never place herself in the position where it sounds like her voice is trying to compete with the song because, in the end, she realizes the song will have more of an effect on listeners with a coherent, unified approach. And so it does.
The video accompanying the single has a lot of humor and excellent performances all around. If you’ve been watching music videos for a long time, you have seen this sort of set up before, but the execution is excellent, the sets hit the mark, and the overall quality enhances the single’s presentation rather than detracting. We are decades past the days of MTV and the outsized influence music videos once had on the world, but they are still an effective way of helping promote a new release. Moreover, the video for “Pretend Love” stands on its one as a well-crafted short clip.
She has made the right decision shifting away from southern rock in favor of this direction. There is more diversity in her work than this, without question, but Glitter sounds like she has discovered a path with songs such as “Pretend Love” that will help her establish a deeper musical identity than she has enjoyed thus far. The North Texas bred singer/songwriter is poised to make a major leap into the future with this new single and her prospects burn brighter than ever before.
Colin Jordan
