-=- SHGZ -=-
* Shoegaze * Indie * Post-rock * Grunge * Dream Pop * Ambient * Ethereal *
Artist..: Lush
Album...: Gala
GENRE....: Indie
STYLE....: Shoegaze
LABEL....: 4AD SCENE.....: 2015-12-11
BITRATE..: 906 kbps avg STORE.....: 1990-00-00
ENCODER..: FLAC 1.2.1 -8 -V TRACKS....: 15
SIZE.....: 299.3MB SOURCE....: CD
URL..: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gala_(album)
- TRACKLIST
1 Sweetness And Light 5:19
2 Sunbathing 3:09
3 Breeze 2:48
4 Deluxe 3:31
5 Leaves Me Cold 2:56
6 Downer 2:40
7 Thoughtforms 2:45
8 Baby Talk 2:18
9 Thoughtforms 2:45
10 Scarlet 3:27
11 Bitter 2:02
12 Second Sight 2:40
13 Etheriel 3:25
14 Hey Hey Helen 2:29
15 Scarlet (New Version) 3:55
Total Playtime: 46:09
I had to go through a labyrinth of amazing old school Geocities websites to
find a decent photo of Lush. The mid-Æ90s was such a golden age for web
design, yaÆll. Why donÆt designers use wicked animated GIFs anymore? Manà
fuckinÆ Geocitiesà oooh weee. I had a Geocities website and it ruled so hard.
Anyway, conventional shoegazing history operates, for all intents and
purposes, as follows. When the "Scene That Celebrated Itself" collapsed on
itself around the same time as grunge (roughly Q3 of 1994) your band did two
things: either dismantled or went a very different direction. Lush chose the
latter, and released some kinda shitty music toward the end of their career.
However, LushÆs Gala compilation, which comprised of the groupÆs first three
EPs collected on one priced-to-own record long before the Beta Band thought
of doing it, is not just some of the best dream pop ever recorded - itÆs just
some of the best rock and roll recorded. Lush, along with Cocteau Twins,
established what the 4AD sound was all about.
Few artists truly balanced noise and gentleness, grandeur and intimacy better
than Lush did between 1989 and 1992. 1990's Gala was the introduction of Lush
to the world, and 1992's Spooky, their frist proper album of original
material, was just as good. After Spooky, Lush moved toward the more minimal
and bubblegum end of the spectrum, riding the wave of the Britpop craze.
Lovelife, their final album due to drummer Chris AclandÆs tragic suicide, was
their best selling, but also furthest removed from anything remotely
shoegazing in sound. As such, Lush is often best remembered for "Ladykillers"
and stuff like that instead of what the majority of their output sounded
like.
No bueno, homes. "Second Sight" is what Lush is about: jangly guitars, sonic
cathedral vocals, tinges of psychedelia and punk, and the usual shoegazing
flourishes. "Scarlet" rips so hard that it hurts. It reminds me of how much
indie rock sucks this day and age, and how much I bum on my parents for
having me in 1984 instead of a decade earlier so I couldÆve been around to
experience the excellent jams and slackerdom zeitgeist. "Hey Hey Helen"
features absolutely gorgeous vocal harmonies on top of a bed of fuzzbox
destruction and chorus-heavy examinations underneath the song. ItÆs an ABBA
cover by the way. I donÆt want to hear it, I love ABBA. They own. DonÆt give
a fuck.
They say you canÆt judge a book by its cover, and perhaps thatÆs true. But
you sure as hell can identify a shoegazing album by its cover. Is it all
luqidy and colorful like Gala? ItÆs probably shoegaze.
*
25 years later, those tracks are being compiled once again - along with
everything else Lush recorded in their 11-year existence - as Chorus, a 5-CD
collection commemorating the band's long-wished-for-but-highly-unlikely
reunion. Chorus comes alongside the announcement of a small handful of 2016
concerts (two in London, one in New York), and fans are justifiably excited
about all of these developments ... but nowhere nearly as excited as we were
25 years ago when Gala was first released in the U.S.
For those folks unwilling to shell out 10 bucks for an import EP with three
or four songs, but nonetheless enraptured by the stream of positive reviews
and hype pouring forth from weekly editions of Melody Maker and the NME
(which were probably read in the record store, but not purchased because,
man, those were also some expensive imports), Gala was an opportunity to get
ears around a band that exuded a ton of promise.
Lush was, at the time, the standard-bearer for the nascent shoegazing
movement. Before the scene evolved into its woozy, miasmic, post-Loveless
womb-rock form, "shoegaze" was best described as pop bands who balanced thick
guitar textures and pronounced melodies, and Lush was the preeminent
practicioner of the form. The three EPs compiled on Gala demonstrated the
band's rapid evolution over the course of 1989 and early 1990. After the wiry
and direct Scar mini-album (which captured a nascent band's poppy, post-punk
approach), Lush enlisted Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins to produce the
four-song Mad Love EP, which, unsurprisingly, was thick with overdubs, guitar
washes, and dreampop elements, an approach which was refined further on the
three-track, Tim Friese-Greene (Talk Talk)-produced Sweetness and Light EP.
Gala tacked two new tracks: a reworked (and Guthrie-produced) version of
Scar's "Scarlet" and a cover of ABBA's underrated divorce-pop masterpiece
"Hey Hey Helen."
The compilation was hugely successful. Following Ride's similar Smile EP and
now-classic Nowhere LP by a couple of months, it positioned Lush and Ride as
the two primary flag-bearers for U.K. shoegaze in the American college-rock
underground, and the two were perfectly complementary, as both bands
experimented with the alchemy of pop melodies and guitar soundscapes in
different proportions. Appropriately enough, the two went out on a
co-headlining tour in 1991, further boosting the profile of both bands and
spreading the shoegaze gospel across the grunge-saturated United States.
After Gala, Lush would continue to evolve and heighten their impact on the
indie-rock scene with a string of highly influential and diverse albums. The
suicide of drummer Chris Acland effectively (and rightly) ended the band in
1998, but 17 years later, with the reunion shows and the release of Chorus,
it's possible that an entire generation of new fans may get to experience the
same thrill that Gala and its tour gave to audiences 25 years ago.
-=- SHGZ -=-
P.S.
** Thanks ***
*** BCC FNT IPC SSR ***
*** For Knowing Where The Music Is At ***
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* NuHS we miss you! *
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