WOW. Wow, wow, wow. We thought it was a miracle when Godspeed put out their first record in ten years, but this drought-end makes that hiatus look like a power-nap. We're still working through all of our many thoughts and feelings about mbv, but we will say this: we're pretty sure that My Bloody Valentine's first new album in over twenty years (and the first new material from Kevin Shields since his lovely contributions to the Lost in Translation soundtrack) was infinitely more worth the wait than Chinese Democracy. Personally speaking, now I just need the La's to finally put out that second album of theirs, and the teenage anglophile inside of me can die content. Sorry, that sounds sad and gross.
As it happens, right before the mbv-bomb dropped, we were mulling over one of their past contemporaries: Lush.
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| Lush, looking rather tough for a 4AD band. |
Sparking up not long after the genre first burnt out, the slow-burning afterlife of shoegaze's influence has insistently drifted further and further on. The resurrection first rose up in earnest in scattered places. The Pacific Northwest was an especially fertile ground for the revival, with bands like Voyager One and The Melody Unit taking loose form just a year after, for instance, Lush, called it quits. Soon after that, there were so many neo-shoegazers in the land of evergreens that a local label started holding an annual covers-night bash, which came with accompanying compilation CDs. More and more bands since then have worn the influence to varying degrees, and "dream pop" -- a fittingly vague cloak that drapes over everything from Beach House to Wild Nothing -- has now made it the norm. This has, of course, come with the requisite amount of homage paid to that once-maligned first generation.
This has happened to Ride a number of times, perhaps (unsurprisingly) more than any of their peers. There are groups out there called OX4 and Chrome Waves, and there is also Seattle's long-running Black Nite Crash, which took their name from a song title that Ride themselves nicked, from a chapter of Bob Dylan's crap 1960's experimental poetry novel Tarantula. Ride's Tarantula was also crap, save for "Black Nite Crash," one of its few redeeming songs. There is also London's Sennen, who get bonus points for naming themselves after one of the band's prettiest B-sides.
The odds of two modern atmosphere enthusiasts sipping from the same ethereal soda can was inevitable. Last October, the tediously monikered Letting Up Despite Great Faults released their not-tedious album Untogether. Side note: it's safe to assume that more than one person saw this cover and figured 'Untogether' was the name of the band...and, really, it probably should have been.
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| Letting Up Despite Great Faults |
"Untogether," as a title, doesn't necessarily belong to Lush. It was also the title of a song from Belly's 1993 debut album Star. That itself is quite possibly not a coincidence. Given the two were contemporaries who shared more than a few fans, perhaps Tonya Donnelly was a fan of Lush's Spooky (released the year before Star) and decided to borrow the non-word. "Untogether" is also the name of a fantastic song by Women (RIP), but that song came out only a few years ago, and is thus not as likely to be borrowed from.
Also, given Letting Up Despite Great Faults' neo-shoegaze stylings, Lush is a more likely musical influence.
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| Blue Hawaii |
That influence isn't necessarily as clear with Canadian duo Blue Hawaii, who will soon release their own Untogether. Their vibe is dream-poppy enough, and I'm convinced that at least one of them owns Spooky, but if they said they hadn't listened to it since Freshman year, I'd believe them. Maybe in their case they did get the title from their countrymen, Women. Or maybe it was all chance, and they simply didn't check before naming their record. That wouldn't be surprising, given one member of Blue Hawaii's other band, Braids,
also forgot to google before picking a name.
The point of pointing out all of the above is -- aside from the human brain's predilection for pattern recognition -- that this is all excellent news for Lush's legacy. When Deerhunter released their own (less languid) "Desire Lines," the act of doing so articulated the growing influential value of Lush's work. This new development takes that validation a step further. Well, at least for most of that body of work -- from Gala to Split. Their last, Lovelife, will probably have to wait a while longer (for the inevitable Britpop resurrection) for ever-morphing public tastes to value its redeeming qualities.
To wit, by the late-mid-90's, the concept of Lush having much of any legacy was questionable. Lush were sideswiped, and then swept up, by the ascendance of Union Jack rock -- as were many of the Thames Valley flock. Catherine Wheel, whose Chrome remains one of the highlights of early-90's British rock, went grunge too late, before going Britpop too late. Slowdive -- now retroactively beloved as much as they were shunned at the time -- went further into space before moving on to other great things (Mojave 3). Ride's rapid decline from their first few glorious records to the dull Carnival of Light and the d.o.a. Tarantula, was especially disheartening to watch. Comparatively then, Lush managed their path through the changing fashion better than much of the rest. Their rebranding even came with a new bright pink logo that combined Oasis' frame logo and Blur's circle logo.
UK bands have long been allowed to change their stripes between albums (the Beatles, Bowie, Blur), and Lush always put hooks and structures just underneath the delay and chorus pedals. Still, Lovelife was a bit of a stretch, and singles like "Ladykillers" and "500" primarily bore simple and immediate rewards. Droning on with shoegaze felt out of fashion in 1996, but, by the end of the following year, as Be Here Now bellowed "Iceberg, right ahead!" on the Britpop Titanic, "Single Girl" felt equally adrift. On the bright side, the world did get a duet between Jarvis Cocker and Miki Berenyi out of the whole ordeal, so there are no hard feelings.
UK bands have long been allowed to change their stripes between albums (the Beatles, Bowie, Blur), and Lush always put hooks and structures just underneath the delay and chorus pedals. Still, Lovelife was a bit of a stretch, and singles like "Ladykillers" and "500" primarily bore simple and immediate rewards. Droning on with shoegaze felt out of fashion in 1996, but, by the end of the following year, as Be Here Now bellowed "Iceberg, right ahead!" on the Britpop Titanic, "Single Girl" felt equally adrift. On the bright side, the world did get a duet between Jarvis Cocker and Miki Berenyi out of the whole ordeal, so there are no hard feelings.
