Lush Album Recommendations: "Gala"

Album Recommendations: Gala

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Lush

[#] Gala (1990)

IT'S SO FUCKING SHINY.

Reviewed September 14, 2018

It's common for people involved in a music scene to hang journalists off balconies for considering them part of said music scene. It happened to grunge, it happened to new wave, and relevantly to today, it happened to shoegaze. The fine walls of sound these kids were constructing deserved a lot better of a name, frankly, but that didn't stop them. Boy, did we get some really great albums out of it. Just look at their legacy! A million droning, boring, dream-popper indie kids with more reverb pedals than song ideas, and a Finelines follow-up that we're still waiting on. ...Okay, so maybe shoegaze has seen better days, but boy, did we get some really great albums out of it.

Lush is the girliest of the big four of shoegaze, owing to the shimmering guitars and dual-female vocals of Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson, and 1990's Gala is a stateside compilation of their first three EPs, Scar, Mad Love, and Sweetness and Light. In a way, Sweetness is the weakest stretch of the disc, kind of an overproduced, sickly sweet mess, but the other two EPs fare much better. "De-Luxe" is the first flash of brilliance, with its harmonies and smouldering middle eight, and the entire stretch of Scar is even better, seeing the band toy with punk tempos that smoke as much as they glimmer. Highly recommended listening—the dream-poppers could stand to learn from it.