Shoegaze often has a problem with valuing style over substance. The genre is primarily built on hazy aesthetics and a collection of pet sounds copped largely from My Bloody Valentine and their contemporaries. The modern shoegaze scene is filled with bands pumping out songs that wouldn’t be worth a damn without their Instagram-ready pedalboards, and the fans that support them. And I’d know: I’m one of those fans.
Luckily, Texas quartet Blushing manages to nail the Platonic ideal of the shoegaze aesthetic without skimping on fresh songwriting and composition.
I became a big fan of Blushing with their self-titled debut, which I previously praised for unexpected writing choices: fresh chord progressions, interesting rhythmic shifts, and surprising key changes. Having revisited that album before receiving this in the mail though, Possessions makes the self-titled look as bland and uninspired as that record made most of the bands in the Shoegaze tag on Bandcamp. The dreamy bits are dreamier, the heavy bits are heavier, and the airy melodies and rich harmonies are as great as ever. One of the most thrilling examples of this is the shift in “Surround (With Love)” from its bare-bones opening half to an explosive finale that gets pretty close to punk. “Waster” similar finds its dreamy, minor-key choruses being interrupted by a nuclear blast of distortion and drum fills, without feeling incongruent. “Lost Cat” abruptly shifts tempo between the verse and chorus without losing a step.
The interplay that they’ve always had is due to the close relationship between the band members before they ever formed the band: guitarist Noe Carmona and drummer Jacob Soto grew up playing in bands together in El Paso, and when they moved to Austin and got married, their wives Christina and Michelle discovered that they had a natural compatibility as well, and Blushing was born. But in writing their sophomore record, the chemistry between them as musicians was put into a centrifuge. A few months into the writing process, the world shut down due to the pandemic. The studio became a bunker, both in the isolation it provided and in the distraction it gave to the calamity outside. The blissful walls of noise weren’t just matters of genre convention: they were a fortress. The sharp guitars on tracks like “The Fires” sound practically weaponized, wielded like a band of survivors in an apocalyptic survival movie.
As fresh as it is, it doesn’t sound foreign. Possessions taps into the archetypes of 90s shoegaze as if they were right there alongside Slowdive and Chapterhouse. They’re certainly speaking the language developed by My Bloody Valentine and others in the pantheon, but they’re telling their own stories authentically and without accent.
That authenticity gets a boost by some of the helping hands: Miki Berenyi of Lush (and now Piroshki) provides guest vocals on “Blame.” Mixing and mastering was handled by Mark Gardener of Ride, who knows a thing or two about wielding noisy guitars and free-ranging drums like armaments. Incidentally, that process was also marked by calamity, as the band was unable to communicate with Gardener for several days after the ice storms that ravaged Texas last winter left them without power or internet.
As much shoegaze credibility as these two give the record, I’m not sure Blushing actually needed them. They had already shown themselves as a band to watch on the strength of their self-titled. But Possessions proves that they’re one of the best bands in the modern shoegaze scene. Their self-titled drew comparisons to bands like No Joy and Slow Crush, but this record shows that they’re not just following in their footsteps: they’re marching side by side.