Lushloss
Asking/Bearing
Reviewed by: Ziggy Merritt
Take a moment to look up Lushloss in Spotify. If you tab over to “Related Artists,” names like Kate Bush, Death Cab for Cutie, and PJ Harvey all spring up. It’s strange. Strange because not one of those artists, giants in their own right, share much of a common thread besides developing a sound that’s uniquely their own. You know when you’re listening to a Kate Bush song, you know when you’re listening to a PJ Harvey song. Lushloss, the experimental electronic project of one Olive Jun, has the same effect.
Their debut, Asking/Bearing is an intensely personal experiment and it’s not hyperbolic to say so. For the first half, Asking, Skype conversations between Jun and her mother close each track, with each snippet cut just before the discussion becomes overwhelming. The first time it happens you almost feel like you’re intruding, but each successive track strings together a narrative of loss, identity, and painful recollections that inform the music itself. They make themselves integral to how the album exposes and treats grief.
“Gutter” is the most direct with this as bits of human noise and recordings intersect throughout weepy synthetic bells and pulses. It sets the tone for the first half of the record, which is solemn and almost formless in parts. “Sheet” and “Clark, WA” lend acoustic touches hidden behind the same scratchy, lo-fi fuzz wrapped around Jun’s vocals.
Bearing is much more harmonically pure. Here the music is independent of any outside context, almost as if Jun composed it to be therapeutic. That supposed intention is only furthered by the title itself, no longer asking but bearing with certain encompassing revelations and the grief they produce. Resolution to the worrying tension between life and family is almost necessary and its done so with care. “Old Oak” and “Gymnasium” are the best at doing so, adopting a purposefully glitchy sound that recalls bits of Baths, Gold Panda, and just about any of the minimalism-minded innovators on the Ghostly International roster. Bearing captures echoes that bounce off an unknown location and time, yet wherever and whenever that location is, it’s welcoming.
Rating: Badass
