It's always a good idea to keep a healthy selection of shoe-gazer pop lying around. It's great mood music, often good for zoned-out highway driving, and always appropriate as background music for doing work.
Lush grew up in the British shoe-gazer scene of the early 1990's, though they were overshadowed by their peers (My Bloody Valentine, Ride, the Boo Radleys). By the time they had done their time touring Lollapalooza and working the U.K. underground scene, Lush had an extensive cult following, and was showing a lot of promise.
Their second album, Split, was released to rather mixed reviews, despite being their strongest album. Vaguely cinematic (drawing conceptual comparisons with Hooverphonic), this is all about the dark secrets of romance. In short, Miki Berenyi sings about nothing new, but her angelic voice, especially when layered over heavily distorted guitars crunching minor chords, grabs you and won't let you go. The production is excellent as well, seamlessly blending songs and maintaining thematic cohesion while remaining deliciously lo-fi.
Split begins with the ethereal "Light From a Dead Star," transitioning orchestral tune-ups into delicately twanged electric guitars. "He lives his life in a world/Full of women and he takes/What he wants from their love/And he throws the rest away," Miki croons over the gentle sway. Lyrically, it's not anything new or unexpected, though it's very well composed - every song lyric could stand on its own as poetry, though not always the best. "Light..." continues its swell throughout it's 3+ minutes, until it slowly degenerates back into the aimless strings of the beginning. It's absolutely pristine.
The album lolls along, through catchy pop hooks and generally miserable, introspective lyrics. The next shiner of a song is "Hypocrite," all about the jilted ego of a girl facing her man. The instruments are loud, blaring, fuzzy, insistent. "You hypocrite/Don't talk to me cause you're not fit to know me/So don't pretend you understand/Cause you coulda never been my friend," she yells, as the guitars bleed sound. It's angry, it's girl power before the Spice Girls ruined it. "I guess I'll say that you betrayed him," Miki sneers out of the side of her mouth, "I'm such a hypocrite." It's refreshing to remember the angst of 1994, and how "in" it was before Kurt Kobain made it so damnably popular.
"Lovelife" immediately follows. A long story of emotional reconciliation, it flows and lilts through infatuation, ending in tepidness. The "doo-doo-wah's" and playful riffs evoke summertime, the weightless feeling of falling into love. The lyrics are typically obsessive, tracing the course of feeling and wonderment that accompanies the boyfriend. It somehow manages to be a bit creepy, too, as Miki wails about suffocation and sunshine, breezes and poison. It's excellent.
Article comments
1 - Rafael
This is a fantastic album. It´s my favourite of the guitar-dreamopo-shoegazer era. It´s diverse (much ore than anything My Bloody Valentine or Ride ever did), and still sharper and very focused. It´s a pity that´s not so well known.