Lush

Lush

Since 1987 · United Kingdom

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Spooky (1992)

Produced by Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins, Spooky is Lush at their most directly dreamy — Guthrie's guitar processing blurring the edges of Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson's dual vocals while the rhythm section keeps the songs moving forward rather than dissolving into pure texture. Berenyi and Anderson's harmonies — both singing lead simultaneously in different registers — give the album a duality that no other shoegaze record matched. The Guthrie connection situates it sonically between 4AD's existing dream-pop aesthetic and the grungier shoegaze emerging from Creation Records.

Sleeve notes

Spooky · 1992

Lush were the 4AD band who bridged shoegaze and the Britpop era — a positioning that made them impossible to fully claim by either scene and perhaps contributed to their too-early dissolution. Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson's guitar textures were unambiguously in the 4AD tradition — layered, reverb-heavy, romantic — but their pop instincts were always present, and the Elastica-adjacent lurch of their later singles suggested a band who were curious about where else they could go.

Spooky (1992), produced by Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins, is the definitive Lush record: dense, melodic, the guitars processing the melodies rather than carrying them, Berenyi's voice slightly submerged in the mix, the whole thing sitting at the precise intersection of shoegaze opacity and pop clarity. Split (1994) is more direct and more ambivalent about that directness. The death of drummer Chris Acland in 1996 ended the band. Their 2016 reunion produced Blind Spot, an EP that recaptured something the intervening years had clarified.