music
“How to get out? Out of this town?”, sang Glockenwise, in 2011, in the song “Colombine”. They were young, four boys from an industrial town in Minho, where the idea of spending your life making art was still something rather strange. Trusted with the non-conformist energy of punk and the innocence and joviality of their youth, they seized centre stage in the Barcelos music scene, which was rising on the national rock scene. After three cult albums, all sung in English – Building Waves (2011), Leeches (2013), and Heat (2015), – the band reinvented itself in December 2018. Unanimously spotlighted as the national album of the year, Plastic was a turning point in the band’s life, a masterpiece in the most recent modern music made in Portugal. For the first time sung entirely in Portuguese, Glockenwise showed the “Lisbon critics” how things were done on the periphery. The garage rock that accompanied them in the early years matured into a more pop aesthetic, where you could still hear the echoes of Minho’s melancholy.
Gótico Português, the band’s new record, isn’t just a return to the albums; it’s also a return to the periphery. If in 2011 (The) Glockenwise looked at Barcelos as a place on the periphery they only wanted to escape, in 2023, Glockenwise sees the periphery through another lens. Released and recorded independently and under their own name, Gótico Português is a look at marginal Portugal, rich in visual and oral traditions, and abounding in interesting and bizarre cultural manifestations. It is the art that goes from the pottery of Rosa Ramalho to the blessings of Alexandrina de Balazar. It is the culture of Do It Yourself music, the culture that was and is the essence of Glockenwise, which allowed them to transgress all the limits, even if they had to shove the whole backline, drums included, on a train, to go play in the capital.
