It’s simply as properly that the halcyon days of shoegaze didn’t yield a lot in the best way of arena-filling acts or blockbuster albums. Thus was the fanbase spared the indignity of getting to see ageing favourites taking part in outside festivals with names like Monsters Of Reverb or signing sleeves at Dream Pop Fan Expo 2023. It’s nonetheless been oddly heartwarming to see so many indicators of vitality among the many period’s flagship acts, what with Experience and Slowdive in wonderful well being and scene elders Elizabeth Fraser and Kevin Shields resurfacing with sturdy new music, albeit within the type of a fuzz-pedal demo within the latter’s case.

Now one other of shoegaze’s authentic progenitors has returned with an album that boasts a comparable diploma of verve amid the requisite provide of shimmer and swirl. A really belated solo debut, Pearlies contains the primary songs to be launched below Emma Anderson’s personal title since she started her musical profession alongside her faculty pal and future Lush associate Miki Berenyi in mid-’80s London. It’s additionally her first album for the reason that untimely finish of Lush’s reunion in 2016, their detente lasting lengthy sufficient for the band to carry out exhibits within the UK and North America, and to report and launch the four-song EP “Blind Spot”.

Just like the songs on “Blind Spot”, Pearlies standouts such because the stately single “Bend The Spherical” and the softer “Willow And Mallow” see Anderson revisit the gauzy sound of Lush’s early years versus their brasher Britpop-era hits like “Single Lady”. However whereas the sooner EP may appear each tantalising and tentative, Pearlies feels extra assured, the music right here serving as totally realised reminders of the items that Anderson displayed not simply in Lush however Sing-Sing, her underrated duo with Lisa O’Neill which cut up in 2007.

Certainly, for all of the shoegaze and dream-pop emblems that may be discovered inside, Pearlies is sort of completely different than it’d’ve been had Anderson developed the concepts and demos she was engaged on in 2016 into full-fledged Lush songs as she initially meant. Within the wake of the cut up, her subsequent plan was to mould them into items for movie and TV soundtracks with assist from cellist and arranger Audrey Riley and Robin Guthrie, an method that explains the cinematic high quality of the music right here. Anderson had deliberate to foreground a singer apart from herself, a lot as she had with Berenyi in Lush and O’Neill in Sing-Sing. It was solely upon Guthrie’s urging that Anderson sing them herself, and he was proper to insist.

After the same old pandemic delays, she convened in a Northamptonshire studio with producer James Chapman aka Maps as her principal musical associate. Suede guitarist Richard Oakes additionally contributes to 4 songs, together with opener “I Was Miles Away”. It’s one in all a number of songs that share the ethereal melodicism of Anderson’s first nice piece for Lush, 1990’s “Sweetness And Gentle”. But Pearlies additionally sees her push deeper into modes that lie past dream-pop’s common mist-laden realm, starting with the eerie synthesis of pastoral people, woozy psychedelia and hauntological pop in “Inter Gentle”. In a way paying homage to Portishead’s “Mysterons” and Broadcast’s “Earlier than We Start”, it combines the sickly-sweet high quality of a love theme in some forgotten ’60s TV drama with intimations of the uncanny. Anderson’s softly sung warnings (“Don’t be afraid/Tread rigorously/Springtime is fading away”) spotlight the album’s sinister undercurrents, as does “Xanthe”, a fantastically chilling interlude that Anderson augments with the identical sort of “la-la-la” lullaby that Mia Farrow carried out for Krzystof Komeda’s theme for Rosemary’s Child.

The bucolic “Willow And Mallow” hints at one other iconic horror rating, with Anderson citing the music of The Wicker Man as an inspiration together with Goldfrapp’s Seventh Tree. Right here once more Anderson exposes roots which have lengthy a part of her singing and songwriting – specifically Vashti Bunyan and Shirley Collins at their most spectral – however had been maybe obscured by shoegaze’s clouds of reverb. There’s a way all through that she’s reaching again in the direction of an older music, which befits the album’s many lyrical references to the passing of time and midlife realisations. “And now the summer time’s over, the nights are drawing in”, she sings on the nearer “Clusters”, one other music right here whose crystalline prettiness and poppy immediacy exist alongside a deeper unease.

Whereas Pearlies usually invitations comparisons with music by Lush’s many dream-pop descendants – “The Presence” and “Tonight Is Mine” being simply two songs right here that Seashore Home will want they’d crafted – Anderson frequently finds intriguing methods of deviating from these templates. In so doing, she’s capable of nudge the guitar pedals apart and display that her music nonetheless has different locations to go.