Last year, I caught the crest of the hype-wave for Blushing as it was cresting. I listened to it on Spotify, fell in love, and upon finding that the vinyl was way out of my budget, I put them away, trying to forget about them. That is until this week, when my friend Rob included it in an order of cassette tapes from his label, Friend Club Records. So now, I get to fall in love with this record all over again.

I know what you might be thinking—does this guy really need another shoegaze record? And it’s true that for many of the trend-chasing bands in the so-called shoegaze revival scene, the most important part of the genre is the aesthetic. Sometimes, it seems like these bands would rather have an excuse for guitar fuzz or reverb pedals than offer songs with any real compositional fiber.

And truth be told, I love a lot of those bands. I will gladly sit through forty-five minutes of pedalboard demonstrations put to wax, and then I’ll buy it on vinyl. I’m easy to please.

But while Blushing might often get mentioned in the same breath as a lot of the say-nothing revivalists, they don’t just hit the aesthetic of shoegaze. They have the songs to back it up.

As a movement, shoegaze traffics in a lot of the same textures: huge walls of loud guitars juxtaposed against glistening atmospheres, with syrupy vocals buried in layers of echo to the point that their indiscernible (does anyone actually know what Kevin and Bilinda are singing?). In the pursuit of the purest version of this aesthetic, many bands seem to let songwriting fall by the wayside. Lyrics are thoughtless. Chord progressions are cliche. Structures are formulaic.

But on their self-titled debut full-length, Blushing offers the best of both worlds. The guitar textures are so pure shoegaze that you could be fooled into thinking this was released on 4AD in the early 90s. However, the songs are fresh and inventive. While they might sound like hundreds of other bands (comparisons to A Sunny Day in Glasgow, No Joy, Slow Crush, and other female-fronted shoegaze acts are inevitable), they have a voice that is all their own.

One of the things that sets them apart isn’t just how closely they adhere to the shoegaze commandments, but their sense of composition. The transitions between verses and choruses aren’t merely a matter of volume, but of harmonic unpredictability. Chords are borrowed. Keys modulate in unexpected ways. In many ways, its reminiscent of a lot of the inventive changes that filled the airways in the 90s from acts like Seal, The Cranberries, Radiohead, etc. On this record, it’s especially seen in the slowburn opener “So Many” and the shapeshifting “Running.”

It’s not just pop bliss though—there’s plenty of heavy, metallic edge. The eventual eruption of “So Many” brings a guitar solo so sludgy it could sit with Cult of Luna at lunch. The chorus of “Dream Merchants” interrupts an otherwise jaunty pop tune with squelching, minor keyed feedback. The bridge is even noisier, returning to the bouncing riff of the verses like you’re waking up from a nightmare.

The record maintains the same level of both textural and compositional mastery. There isn’t a moment on the record that isn’t absolutely gorgeous, nor a musical moment that falls flat. And if this is what they have to say on their debut, I’ll be paying close attention.

 

p.s. of particular note is the track “Me With You,” which makes me laugh because this record was sent to me in a mewithoutYou box to trick me.