REVIEW

Like Brad Laner of Medicine before him, Scott Cortez constructed Bloweyelashwish almost entirely through a 4-track recorder in the lowest of lo-fi settings.

While Medicine’s sound was harsh, distorted, noise-rock-turned-noise-pop, Lovesliescrushing creates a shimmering palette of ultra-ethereal noise that permeates every aural channel with a gloriously gothic glaze of guitar beauty. The 20 tracks on the record aren’t discrete songs so much as semi-instrumental, dreamlike soundscapes, with vocalist Isabel’s choir-like voice lending the only detectable hint of human warmth amidst a storm of surreal distortion.

The record cuts across a wide spectrum of sounds, from the brooding ambience of “Plume”, the anthemic wall of sound of “Babysbreath” and the glimmering, flanger-drenched sonic waves of “Sugaredglowing” It’s like an aural timelapse of a flower blooming and then dying.

This would be LLC’s sole foray into Loveless-style shoegaze, as future albums would focus on a more ambient sound. The noisy side of LLC would be revived on Cortez’ future side project Astrobrite but in a significantly higher-decibel, overexposed, free form chaos-laden format that’s closer to Medicine. Bloweyelashwish on the other hand is steeped in an inescapably captivating and utterly unique melancholy that the rest of the shoegaze genre has never truly managed to reproduce.

It’s easily the most avant-garde interpretation of British shoegaze and a stone-cold classic of the genre. Despite being released not too long after Loveless, there still isn’t anything quite like it out there. Highly, highly recommended.  

July 12, 2020