Lustre - Blossom DIGI-CD

Atmospheric Black Metal/Ambient from sweden

Just as the prior Phantom EP introduced a couple of new twists for the prolific and sometimes frustratingly inconsistent Lustre, their latest full-length takes yet another turn. Unlike Phantom, which added subtle variations such as ever-so-slightly more involved guitar playing and synth horns as leads yet took a significant turn back toward the project's long-winded ambient black metal roots, Blossom takes yet another turn to the side, shifting the formula just enough to feel a bit uneasy or uncomfortable.

The album's four songs are all under ten minutes. In all my years of listening to music, I can think of very few examples of a band significantly altering the average song lengths and still retaining whatever sense of magic they had about them in the first place. Bands with long, sprawling songs opting for shorter tracks always feels like the band is either aiming for more accessibility or perhaps just hasn't got it in them to stretch their legs anymore, while bands who previously thrived on short and to the point music moving toward longer songs often heralds an overindulgence and bloated songwriting style, packed with all manner of extraneous instrumentation and other bits of out-of-place pretension. While Lustre did have some worthwhile shorter tracks in their early career, their masterworks were always their longer pieces, so I can't help but be disappointed that once again they've opted for smaller songs, especially after Phantom seemed like a return to the more lengthy compositions of their best music.

True to expectations based on the album's title, the music on Blossom is very uplifting stuff, with hope-inspiring melodies played on synth flutes and other less easily identified synthesized instruments, while cinematic synth strings wax angelic over the band's trademark swells of distorted, simply-played guitar. Though the percussion on Blossom is only slightly more complex than the bare bones approach that Nachtzeit has used throughout Lustre's expansive discography, the drums are also far more forward in the mix than they ever have been before, which, together with the synth instruments that seem to be aiming somewhat harder to emulate real-world sounds, results in a far more organic sound than we're used to with the typically cold, spacey Lustre.

By now, though, Nachtzeit has really mastered blending this kind of instrumentation together to create dense layers of atmosphere, and even with the shift to lighter moods his expertise with synthesizer melodies means that everything is still brilliantly beautiful. Instead of a nighttime view of distant stars while sitting next to a campfire in a mountain meadow, this stuff sounds like the full daylight soundtrack to a scene of someone doing some serious soul-searching along the shore of a crystalline alpine lake.

The deft hand with the production and melody writing are certainly appreciated, but I'm just not sure I can be as captivated by this more positive-sounding Lustre. It's not even that it's a huge departure; if I close my eyes and try hard, the icedrop leads in "Part 3" almost recall the melancholic beauty of Lustre past, but for every knife-in-the-heart melodic run there's another that wants to hold my hand as we walk through wheat fields in the early morning. Not even the presence of Nachtzeit's trademark reptilian vocals can shake that feeling.

I'm sure there are plenty of folk out there who will appreciate the turn for the more earthy, hopeful sound of this record, who are glad that Lustre have left behind the twenty-minute eulogies for dying stars. There are probably others still who aren't quite as sold on this album's happiness as I am, who think that this is still relentlessly downtrodden stuff, and perhaps they're right and I'm just being stubborn because it's different. But me? I'll just sit here and be grumpy, and hope for a follow-up to the dark beauty of the superior Phantom, and save this one for nights where I'm feeling abnormally cheery.

Tracks:
1. Part 1 08:54
2. Part 2 08:38
3. Part 3 09:42
4. Part 4 05:47