The core elements of the Soft Location sound are Kathy Leisen’s haunting voice and boneyard guitar, and Matt Kantor’s slo-mo jet fuel bass jamminating. Add Tall Firs: Ryan Sawyer’s could-blow-your-pants-off-but-prefer-to-slowly-work-them-over-your-hips drumming and Dave Mies and Aaron Mullan’s creamy dual-savant guitar stylings: two dudes who don’t even know how the other guy’s guitar is tuned but nonetheless have brought the tandem knockout reverb dropkick since 1991. The band actively refuses to discuss influences, even with one another. With two pairs of childhood friends in the band, the music just happens and the listener is left to speculate. The dilettante thinks Chan Marshall or an Astral Weeks-era Van Morrison caught an extra-rad time machine ride and now inhabits every moment from 1955-2013 simultaneously. The serious aficionado is thinking Martha Reeves, Amon Dull II, the Gories, Otis Redding. But Heads know: This thing is wigs, Pepsi commercials, Sam Cooke, hardcore festivals, and free stuff on craigslist. In reality, Glass Rock are a prisonyard football team: a motley collection of wizened lifers, small-time pimps, and the wrongly convicted. Leisen is their Burt Reynolds. A painter on the Outside, she woke up back in the huskau of a recording studio after Awesome Michael ratted her and Kantor out to Ecstatic Peace. In the yard Tall Firs were hanging around bench-pressing twice their body weight. This record documents their crushing and dramatic defeat of the prison guards, and their harrowing escape during the ensuing melee. There is nothing contrived about this band. Neither derivative nor hybridized, GnR II are truly Chimeric. This thing will get bestial with you on the dancefloor, and will hold you tight on a pre-dawn canoe ride; staring at the stars crying at the wonder and terror of it all.