Maria Somerville fully asserts her status as one of the era's most promising nu-gazers on her 4AD debut full-length, emulsifying Cocteaus-y guitar washes with gauzy ambient textures, reverb-soaked vocals and oily, slowcore rhythms. Utterly heart-melting gear.
FFO: Mazzy Star, Jonnine, Hilary Woods, Princ€ss.
We had a pretty good indication that 'Luster' was gonna be special; Somerville's early albums - 2018's 'The Man Called Stone In My Shoe' and 2019's 'All My People' - revealed a rare talent that launched a ghostly, romantic sound that reached far beyond the dream pop glass ceiling. Sure, she's inspired by the early 4AD catalog, but Somerville's sound is far more profound and personal than pure pastiche, integrating traces of Irish folk, Fennesz-pilled ambience, Kiwi jangle pop, diaphanous Beach House-style electro-lounge and moody slowcore. She uses these influences to paint an impressionistic outline of Connemara on 'Luster', capturing its mountainous, emerald wilderness with down-swung, echoed strums, yearning vocal harmonies and clandestine field recordings.
Before Somerville started working on the album she'd been living in Dublin for some time, but had always pined for Galway's rural west coast - just listen to those first DIY recordings and you'll catch her whispering to the past. So 'Luster' is a kind of spiritual homecoming, written in a house in Connemara on the banks of Lough Corrib, one of Ireland's biggest lakes. The water's stillness guides Somerville's placid strums on 'Corrib' as they bob over pastel-hued pads and prudent environmental ambience. Like Grouper's best material, the misty soundscape never capsizes the song itself - Somerville's breathy, reverb-sogged voice sits front and centre, coaxing us through the atmosphere as if she's pulling time-fluxed melodies from the hills that surround her. Even when her words almost disappear on 'Halo', drawn into tape-warped, post-MBV amp bends and ghost chasms, we can still make out the faint silhouette of folk-pop.
Somerville's just as convincing when she amps up the energy; we heard plenty of evidence with the album's dewdrop-spangled lead single 'Projections', and she continues the thought on 'Spring', curling robotic Autotuned vox around a powdered trip-hop crunch and tremolo-bent riffs, and on 'Violet', a coolly psychedelic left turn, she balances distorted kicks and a uilleann pipe from Lankum's Ian Lynch with fluttered drones and casual, Trish Keenan-like vocals. However, the album's most gobsmacking moments come when Somerville just works with gestures, inking a Badalamenti-esque mood on the shimmering, slow-moving 'Up', and losing her euphoric coos in dense clouds of echo on the windswept closer 'October Moon'. There's not a duff moment here - 'Luster' isn't just one of the best pop albums of the year, it's the best thing we've heard from 4AD in years.
