I wrote last month about my initial disappointment with Asobi Seksu’s new album Hush, and now that the album is actually coming out I thought I should update my thoughts on it.
Except that I haven’t really changed my opinion much. Not so much a bad album as a disappointing one, Hush just isn’t as exciting or engaging as its predecessors.
At first I thought that I just missed those big, majestic guitars, since the band chose to go with a spare, fragile sound this time out — reminiscent of classic 4AD recordings — instead of their previous shoegazer guitar roar. And that may be part of it, because as anyone who reads this blog knows, I really like big majestic guitars. But the album’s real problem is that it’s a pretty dull listen, with one delicate, mid-tempo song after another blurring together into a rather dour monotony.
It’s not that the band is bad at dream pop. Songs like “Layers”, “Gliss”, and “Mehnomae” are quite beautiful. But the band has eschewed much of their earlier diversity here — nothing as punky as “Mizu Asobi” or “Asobi Masho”, nothing as flat-out poppy as “I’m Happy But You Don’t Like Me” or “Taiyo” — mostly sticking to frigid, slow numbers. And this is where the production really hurts them, because there’s a surprising lack of dynamics to much of the material, as if a crush of huge guitars on the chorus was the only tool the band had in their arsenal to add emotional punch to their songs, and having decided to not do that this time around, the songs are left feeling empty and cold. The drums and guitars are extremely low in the mix for the most part, which does accentuate Yuki Chikudate’s wonderful, ethereal singing, but also leaves the songs badly in need of an injection of tension, drama, and release.
The album’s two best songs come at the end: “Glacially”, the ninth track, is built on top of a pulsing, melodic bassline (reminiscent of New Order) that adds some welcome urgency to the song, and has a tremolo-laden chorus that adds some of the excitement that’s so lacking elsewhere on the album. And closer “Blind Little Rain” is the album’s absolute highlight, a wonderful melding of girl-group elements (which the band flirted with on their b-side cover of “Then He Kissed Me” a couple years ago) with dream pop. The song is gorgeous and heart-breaking, and exudes a warmth that most of the rest of the album lacks. If only everything on Hush was this good.
, last week, and I’ve been listening to it a fair amount. And I have to say that, so far, I’m not really getting into it.
or 
— “we didn’t want to do 7,000 reverb guitars this time”, etc — and the “Me & Mary” single certainly pointed towards a sparer sound, especially the ethereal b-side, “Breathe Into Glass”, which suggested that the band was looking to 4AD more than My Bloody Valentine this time around. But since I loved “Breathe”, that didn’t seem like a problem.
