Review Summary: the return of hornygaze
Describing shoegaze can be about as much of a bore as many perceive the genre itself to be. Ethereal, dreamy, floaty: cool adjectives, but generally applicable to both good and bad albums adhering to the gaze. I could use those adjectives to describe
Raw Blue, note that it is a very good iteration (and representation) of the genre in the mid-2020s and move on, but it wouldn’t quite convey just how
special this new Whirr album is.
There’s a lot of history to Whirr. Just about all of it is relevant, and all of it is way too expansive to get into right here, right now. On the
people-front, I’ll simply give my professional judgment that, yes, they were behaving very shittily at some point, but they seem fine now (I’ll link an extensive interview with guitarist Nick Bassett below). On the
band-front, I’ll give my even more professional judgment that Whirr’s state of not-touring and rarely-releasing makes any song we hear from them all the more special, let alone a full album dropping out of the blue on Christmas day. What’s even more amazing about the band’s near-constant hibernation is the fact that it has seemingly made them better than ever: 2019’s
Feels Like You was their strongest record yet, and
Raw Blue might be another improvement.
It all depends on if you gel with
Raw Blue’s unobtrusively experimental tendencies. It’s a dark, dense affair and dynamic to what may comprise a fault - the quiet parts are
very quiet and the loud parts
very loud. However, it’s clear that the record has a vision that translates into some wonderfully soothing sounds. When the pulsating “Collect Sadness" repeatedly explodes into a warm wall of sounds, it’s hard to resist its heaviness. When “Crush Tones” dwindles into circular dissonance, it’s nearly impossible not to be drawn in by its dissociation. When “Enjoy Everything” climaxes into a fucking trumpet solo, it’s impossible not to wonder how they pulled it off. In essence,
Raw Blue takes everything Whirr has learned alongside the nugaze who’s who of the record’s liner notes and sees what can be added or subtracted without compromising the contemplative beauty they have all mastered.
In spite of all these words, I still can’t find the perfect ones to adequately represent how special
Raw Blue feels. Perhaps it’s for the better; perhaps the lack of perfect words convey what this collection of songs can mean. Regardless, I am delighted to have over 45 minutes of music to lose myself in for however long the foreseeable future may last.
