A Brief History of Love
Album | The Big Pink
Inviting layers of drones, fuzz, distortion and feedback put in service of well-crafted, instantly memorable pop songs
It's entirely appropriate that London-based duo The Big Pink are signed to 4AD Records, because their debut album is deeply indebted to the label's aesthetic of two decades ago, right down to the Vaughan Oliver-style cover art. But deeper listening reveals that singer Robbie Furze and multi-instrumentalist partner Milo Cordell haven't simply jumped on the emerging neo-shoegaze bandwagon because it's the next big thing: from the way these songs are carefully built from layers of drones, fuzz, distortion and feedback, they clearly know their My Bloody Valentine records backwards and forwards. What makes A Brief History of Love different is that these inviting textures are put in service of well-crafted, instantly memorable pop songs. (It could be at least partially genetic: Cordell is the son of noted pop producer Denny Cordell.) Not everything works -- the pointlessly misogynistic first single "Dominos" sounds like a bad imitation of the Killers -- but the best albums of the first wave of shoegazers were those that married cool, trippy sounds to solid pop songwriting smarts. So perhaps the third wave of shoegazers circa 2029 will cite A Brief History of Love as one of their inspirations.
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