Piroshka — Love Drips & Gathers
Qobuz new release review (July 2021)
Ah, the freedom of the middle-aged indie musician in the 2020s. With (at least) a couple of decades between today and their most memorable flirtations with underground notoriety, the artists who occupied swaths of column inches in Melody Maker and Option are now comfortably removed from any sort of modern relevance, saving them from a need (or desire) to try to fit into contemporary cultural conversation. As opposed to the classic rockers of the previous generation who never let us forget them thanks to incessant FM radio play and unending appearances at state fairs and exurban casinos, the reappearance of Lollapalooza-era artists is generally a welcome, if curious, occurrence.
This peculiar and specific situation has been warmly embraced by several different shoegaze acts; Slowdive, Ride, and Lush all reconstituted themselves for modern listeners with mixed results. (We won’t count My Bloody Valentine, since it’s still difficult to differentiate among “breakup,” “hiatus,” and “20-year-long recording process” when it comes to them.) Both Slowdive and Ride released new albums that built upon their best ’90s work while not explicitly aping it, and have continued to expand on the musical vocabulary they codified 30 years ago on record and in concert. They are, for what it’s worth, once again active and creatively engaged artists. Lush, on the other hand, did the straightforward reunion thing, with a tour accompanied by an obligatory new EP that was enjoyable if not world-beating; once that tour ended, the reunion was called off and the band is once again considered kaput.
However, Lush co-leader Miki Berenyi was clearly reinvigorated by the experience, and soon after the Lush tour ended, she was in the studio with Piroshka, formed with fellow “formerly of” British indie artists including her partner (KJ “Moose” McKillop, formerly of Moose), Justin Welch (formerly of Elastica), and Mick Conroy (formerly — and currently — of Modern English). Their 2018 album Brickbat was an electric surprise for anyone expecting to hear a recombination of any of those earlier bands’ work. The album forged a unique, prickly indie rock sound that was different from anything any of the four had done before, but was nonetheless rewarding and complementary to their legacies.
Now, just three years later, Piroshka has returned with Love Drips & Gathers, which benefits from the band’s relatively expectation-free context. If Brickbat was the revved-up and fiery sound of some gifted geezers shaking the cobwebs off, Love Drips & Gathers sits in a more melancholy place. Opening with a defiantly, er, lush midtempo number (“Hastings”), the album quickly establishes itself as the “prettier, but darker” complement to its predecessor. Never explicitly positioning itself as a shoegaze album, Love Drips & Gathers nonetheless luxuriates in a soundscape-y production approach, with gentle, echo-ey guitars, multi-tracked harmonies, and even the occasional strings, horns, or synthesizer further expanding the vibe. Berenyi is still shouldering the bulk of the vocal burden here, mainly accompanied by herself, which is a bit of a shame since several numbers would benefit from live duet interplay (the brisk and beautiful “Wanderlust,” especially). But the album’s quality is still very much the result of four different musicians; while tracks like the jaunty — and quite morbid! — “Scratching at the Lid” may hearken back to some of your long-past glory days, it’s clear that Piroshka is far less interested in nostalgia. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz
