Every memorable album is the result of a combination of factors, key among them the quality of the songwriting, performances, and production. If any leg of that stool isn’t strong, the integrity of the whole structure is compromised.
When Glass House Rock appeared in 1980, many anticipated it would be the Greg Kihn Band’s breakthrough. Five years of steady touring and annual record releases had brought the Bay Area quintet—Kihn (vocals/guitar), Steve Wright (bass/vocals), Larry Lynch (drums/vocals), Dave Carpender (lead guitar) and new addition Gary Phillips (keys)—to the brink as they consistently sold out shows in Northern and Central California and attracted the attention of contemporaries as notable as Bruce Springsteen and Jonathan Richman.
The Greg Kihn Band were on the brink of breaking through—and they did not. So what went wrong? The flip side of “five years of steady touring and annual record releases” is this: the band had been stuck on the write-record-tour merry-go-round for five years running. What comes through on Glass House Rock is sheer determination, undermined by sheer exhaustion.
The determination is apparent in the quality of the performances. Tightly-wound rockers like “Desire Me” and “The Only Dance There Is” deliver intensity in spades, and the band attacks rock-ier tunes like “Castaway,” “Things To Come” and the closing pair of “Night After Night” and “For Your Love” with everything they have instrumentally and vocally. A big clue as to the source of the trouble can also be found in the latter pair of songs, though: neither was written by Kihn. 
Performances and production (courtesy of Beserkley house producer Matthew King Kaufman) are strong here, but on the songwriting front, bandleader Kihn appears to have run out of steam at the worst possible time. “Castaway” is a sturdy but formulaic rocker, and bland numbers like “Annabelle Lee,” “Small Change,” and “Serenade Her,” as earnest as they are in both composition and delivery, are strictly second-tier material in Kihn’s songbook. Even thumpers like “Desire Me” and “Things To Come” feel like they’re missing something; there just isn’t much there, there.
The album also features two covers and another song that feels like one. “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is a nice showcase for singing drummer Lynch, though its old-time-Western-soundtrack tone and cantering cadence feel out of sync on an album that often uses intensity to try to compensate for its other shortcomings. “Night After Night” finds Kihn taking a background role once again for an atmospheric rocker written and sung by bassist Steve Wright; it has its moments but doesn’t feel like it advances the band’s cause. Even the album’s highlight, a spirited cover of The Yardbirds’ “For Your Love,” with Kihn, Lynch and Wright trading off lead vocals, feels compromised by the choice to include crowd noise. Granted, the track was recorded live in front of an audience at a soundcheck, but crowd noise will never not feel odd on what’s otherwise a studio album.
As a songwriter, Greg Kihn seemed out of breath on Glass House Rock. Ironically enough, when he threw up his hands the next time around and vamped in the studio because he only had half a lyric for his new song, the Greg Kihn Band finally scored the hit they’d been searching for. The wordless vocal hook that anchors “The Breakup Song” would take the Greg Kihn Band to #15 on Billboard’s Top 100 and establish them as a national act.
Glass House Rock was an album that leaned into the urgency the band felt to reach that next level, without the songwriting material to support their ambitions. As such, it’s mostly a footnote in their catalog, despite a handful of strong performances. It would take another year and the considerably stronger set of songs heard on Rockihnroll for the band to finally break through.