Review Summary: INSPIRATIONAL DREAM POP x GARAGE WUNDERLIED ((((+ 7 somnambulant throwaways))))
Cuushe has been making music for over a decade, yet her story is short and awkward. Her saccharine, reverb-heavy dream pop has the kind of sheen that will inevitably find an audience (deservedly, in the case of the highlights from her 2013 record
Butterfly Case), but the most inspiring thing to emerge from her career was her willingness to upend the Japanese music industry’s blind-eye protocol in 2018 and call out producer/DJ Ametsub for sustained harassment and stalking. Ametsub is now a convicted criminal and Cuushe dropped
Waken, her first LP since
Butterfly Case, in 2020: you’ve got the bones of a happy ending there, and
Waken should by all rights hit the plinth as a victorious comeback, but it’s such a thoroughly drab outing that I can hardly imagine a crueller accolade. Seven of its eight tracks are your bog-standard vaporous dream pop, limply propped up by glossy synths and a handful of decent vocal hooks, all of which go to waste amidst unimaginative production and homogenous dynamics. They’re on, they’re gone, they’re forgotten: no use dredging any of that up two years on. Sorry.
The only reason this record gets any spotlight at all at this point is its central highlight “Emergence”. Seldom has it been less necessary to afford the rest of an album an inclusive focus, but this track puts its fellows to shame, complementing its dream pop shimmer with a palpably inspired set of swinging garage beats and pitch-modulated vocal hooks. It’s a match made in heaven, a formula seemingly too perfect and too feasibly inimitable not to have been copied a million times over already (never underestimate just how little innovation your common or garden dream pop act is prepared to showcase); the level of gravity that one shuffling groove adds to an otherwise nebulous whirl of fay soundscapes and dislocated hooks beggars belief. It’s not quite perfect - I
still feel that Cuushe’s choice of vocal melodies is a little complement, as is her reticence to double down on her most propulsive qualities - but the track runs away with its stylings so sensationally that it hardly matters. It’s a knockout and a revelation and almost enough to save a flagging record; whether it will amount to something more is anyone’s guess. It would be a pleasant surprise if Cuushe uses this sound to fuel quality future output, but until then I’m actively hoping to hear more distinctive artists drawing it into their own orbit. Some things are just too good to go to waste.
