a sea of glass

4-A Sea of GlassRecently, I worked as a backstage co-director in Oregon with Joe Carrier, lead singer of this kickass band, for a talent show. While I was there, I also saw my good friend, Aaron Rodriguez of Noisefan Music News, who intended on participating in the event. After seeing these two members of A Sea of Glass, I knew they had to be on this list! Their original and gorgeous compositions blow my mind and make me feel like taking a really long and really relaxed bath. Yeah, these guys know how to get girls wet… was that too much? haha Well it was a joke, you creep!! - Samantha Lee Donaldson

Local group A Sea of Glass opened up the night. Their playing was so tight and their songs so distinctive that I'm a little surprised that I'd never heard of these guys before. Joseph Lyle's light, breathy singing and tender keyboard combined with Sam Carrier's jangly guitar, KJ Zimmerman's soaring violin, Justin Gaupp's sly basslines and Tyler Shockey's furious drumming to create a sound at once delicate and muscular. Gorgeous melodies, yearning lyrics, quietly intricate arrangements. A group to watch out for! - B. Schultz

Weight of the World on A Sea of Glass
By Tim Russow

A crowd of 30 or 40 people is gathered around eight p.m. at the Flying M Garage in Nampa, Idaho. Located in downtown Nampa, the Garage is the perfect place for upcoming local bands to play to a receptive crowd. The renovated mechanic’s shop gets rocking when A Sea of Glass starts their set.

Joined by the other band members after the show, lead singer Joe Lyle approaches me with a half-eaten M&M cookie on a white plate. He’s a 20-something lead singer of an up and coming indie-band called A Sea of Glass and seems a big giddy over their just-finished set.

This is not your average garage band, but they haven’t quite pegged their genre. “We’re trying to figure that out,” Lyle says. “It would be easier to describe bands that inspire us.” They commence to list their favorite bands when their drummer Tyler Shockey jokingly blurts out, “Kanye is a big influence to us.”

All joking aside, this band infuses several genres. Sprinkle a dash of indie, a splash folk, a bit of ambient tonality and 80’s rock. They feature heart pounding drums, smooth guitar licks, fiddle, sleigh bells and a glockenspiel to push the indie-rock genre to its limits.

But wait, this is more than just another copycat wannabe local band trying to break the music scene in Idaho; they are doing more than just trying to blow your eardrums out at every turn. Lead guitar player Sam Carrier says, “To connect with the audience is what we want to do; we want our music to reach out and touch them in the places that they’re at.”

Carrier and Lyle are joined by Shockey on drums and fiddle player KJ Zimmerman and have been playing together since January of 2012. Zimmerman, Carrier and Lyle have worked together for three or four years in various bands and have finally found their niche.

This January marks the release of their new self-titled album, and the new chemistry just works. “We’ve just been waiting for the right guys to make the songs happen,” Lyle explains. “When we met together in January 2012 it was like a big collaboration of figuring each other out for this album.”

The members of A Sea of Glass are multitalented and utilize their skills to incorporate different instruments. On stage, they flex their musical muscle by switching instruments during the songs. They even feature a glockenspiel. “I think ideally, we’d like to have a vibraphone, but in place of that right now is the glockenspiel,” says Shockey. “It’s a little bit more portable.”

They make the instrumental switches look easy, but looks are deceiving. “Tyler’s got the hardest part,” adds Lyle. “Because he’s got to switch from wailing on the drums, like throbbing every muscle in his body, to delicately playing the glockenspiel.”

Beyond the glockenspiel, Zimmerman brings the fiddle and sleigh bells into their instrumental repertoire, “I even play the cymbals,” he adds. During a song, Carrier will trade his guitar for work on the drums. “I’m not a drummer,” he says. “It’s not something we necessarily strive to do, it’s just something that kind of happens.”

With an upcoming CD release of their self-titled new album, members of the band also look to technology to help them find success both on and off the stage. “The computer has so many virtual instruments in it that we probably couldn’t fit on stage, like a cathedral pipe organ,” Lyle says. “We’ll use digital instruments with midi controllers to run those and we have backtracks with ambient soundscapes that we write underneath our music just to fill it out.”

Their writing process is not new to the music world. “The way we go about it is somebody will come up with a progression or a riff and start playing and everybody will start generating ideas and bounce ideas off of each other,” Carrier says. But, their musical style never outweighs the song. “I think we always want the song to be the most important thing over egos or over genre,” Lyle adds. “We try to make the song be everything it can be.” - Tim Russow