Blouse – Blouse

Some bands seem to bear all the hallmarks of quality before you even hear them. Blouse, a retro-styled dream-pop three-piece hailing from Portland, Oregon and signed to Captured Tracks (having released their second single, ‘Shadow’, via Sub Pop) present a weighty debut album that is much more than silver-plated. Indeed, it’s tempting to reflect that this 80s-aping three-piece, who recorded the LP in a warehouse, deliver precisely to specification. This eponymous first full-length doesn’t reveal much we didn’t know before, its heart and nub being easily deduced from ‘Into Black’, ‘Videotapes’ and Time Travel’: three of the shivering, shimmering highlights that were already familiar to fans as singles and/or streams. This is, then, an album of few flaws and few surprises.

The eerie, aerated 80s ambience, conjured so instantly on opener ‘Firestarter’, is impeccably balanced by the lemon wash vocals of nonchalant chanteuse Charlie Hilton, bittersweet and shadowy over the sour synth and austere beats. They might be catching the tailwind of the 80s obsession, but the retro shtick seems sincere and carries the suggestion, in the scuzziest instrumentation, that they may be relocating the decade post-grunge. This is one giveaway that the trio’s music is not authentically-aged but rather a blue-tinged paean to a bygone time.

Much of the instrumentation is chiselled and stark, ‘Time Travel’ possessing almost post-apocalyptic angular urgency and logic-puzzle lyrics (“I was in the future yesterday but now I’m in the past / and it keeps taking me back”). Even so, it’s all immersed in the wash of guitars, synth and faraway industrial percussion that reverberates around the warehouse space for a little over half an hour. Each song is another subtly shapeshifting example of identikit ingredients creating an array of spectral shades. Though there is certainly a lustre about the finished record, this doesn’t detract from the textured grain of each song.

Blouse should be a solid success for Captured Tracks and while this album isn’t as softly sparkling as labelmates Wild Nothing’s glorious Gemini, nor so hazily mesmeric, there are fluctuating senses of the dark and dilapidated, the faded and forgotten, the ephemeral and ethereal. In short, that “abandoned” vibe really comes across, conveying the space and echoing sound of a warehouse very much how it might be imagined. (Production duties were handled by band member Jacob Portrait, who, in addition to being one third of Blouse, is also in Unknown Mortal Orchestra and once worked with the Dandy Warhols.) It is an entirely convincing but not wholly involving collection, the strongest triumph probably being aforementioned first single ‘Into Black’, the immediately familiar first bars of which hail the album’s real hatching. Nostalgia wells as a soundtrackable retro sensibility is sustained but never bettered and, when Hilton coos the album’s closing lines – “High tide, into my eyes / I’m like a fountain, but in rewind” – it’s as satisfying a simile as it is abstruse.

‘Ghost Dream’ stretches thematic credulity a touch, being perhaps the epitome of every serious ethereal synthpop stereotype you might summon to mind – but like everything else on Blouse, it is done so well, it’s easy to banish the cynicism. “Time machines can be unfortunate when they’re in your head”, sings Charlie Hilton, on ‘Time Travel’. Luckily, you cannot help but be transported by this album, even if you missed out the first time. Underpinning all else, Blouse convey their vision with consummate ease and have created a rather splendid sound.