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.
