The Fat Angel Sings

“Laying in the grass, we were dragging on loud/Got my hand in your hand and my head in the clouds.”

This is the scene, set with acoustic atmospherics and frontman Jade Lilitri’s familiar, layered, honey-sweet-but-burnt-around-the-edges vocals, that flickers to life at the start of Oso Oso’s new full-length, “Basking in the Glow”. The track, simply called “intro,” is just that: an intimate, humble, and hopeful prologue that prefaces a record radically committed to letting the light in—because Lilitri knows the darkness like the back of his hand.

The spacious opening proposition of “intro” gives way to “the view,” an electric, invigorating indie rock banger that showcases Lilitri’s slick, effortless melodic excellence and lyrical precision (“I’ll grow, we’ll see/There’s something good in me”). The title track follows, driving home the record’s thesis on a chorus like a roman candle cracking a mid-July night sky: “These days, it feels like all I know is this phase/I hope I’m basking in the glow of something bigger I don’t know.”

Oso Oso mastermind Jade Lilitri sings of digging for clarity but can’t see the light for the dirt beneath his fingernails. Basking In The Glow is an album with all the right answers — an album about how great it feels to have those answers — but with the understanding that knowledge doesn’t necessarily translate into action. As Lilitri sings it, there’s always another angle to question, whether a step forward is a step in the right direction at all. In the grand tradition of forebears like Taking Back Sunday, the Used, and Jimmy Eat World, he quells his doubts by affixing them to airlocked guitars and rocketship choruses, and then launching them into the sun.