On his third album, Jupiter in Velvet continues to draw from his Anglophile glam-rock fascination into fantastically hooky ends. Glitter On The Sun makes the case for the early ’70s sounds of T. Rex, The Sweet and David Bowie as the connective tissue to many trends in rock that followed. Like a sonic counterpart of a hall of funhouse mirrors, it’s easy to discern Def Leppard’s uber-pop manifestation of heavy metal, Cheap Trick’s aggro power pop, Duran Duran’s sleek danceability, a host of indie and Britpop contenders, some working from early ’90s trip-hop and so much more reflected and refracted back in JIV’s crazed, oddly sincere incantations.
That he’s not as stuck, as on previous albums, on strutting like a freaky peacock amid an ennui-ridden sea of normality helps nurture a broader audience. And his penchant for writing love songs to someone other than himself and the disparate tribe of fellow retro-nuevo glitter fiends shows gentility and refinement here, too. Mr. Velvet presently seems content to exist as a studio entity, thereby depriving his Milwaukee home and the rest of the world of a stage show that would surely rival his increasingly assured recorded output. But if staying off the road fosters the mystique he seeks to enhance, so be it. Glitter acts as a pretty astonishingly vivid soundtrack to a concert in one’s own imagination.
