When
Lush split for the second time, in 2016, guitarist and songwriter
Emma Anderson was left with the beginnings of songs she had written for the band. After initial efforts stalled out, she teamed with
Maps'
James Chapman and completed her debut solo album. The sound of
Pearlies isn't far from what one would expect from
Anderson -- very textured and atmospheric, guitar-heavy dream pop with a steady stream of melancholy running through the middle. Despite her early reservations about taking on lead vocals, she proves to be a fine singer who's perfectly able to hold down the center of the swirling mix of sounds, and, to that end, the duo add buckets of reverb and delay to the music, layer in electronic sounds to fill in the gaps, and generally create a warm blanket of sound throughout. The record begins with a tender and celestial mid-tempo ballad "I Was Miles Away" and ends 40 minutes later with "Clusters," another peaceful and jangling mid-tempo track. In between these bookends,
Anderson doesn't deviate much from the mood she begins and ends at, though she does do some admirable tweaking to the formula at times by stepping out from behind the curtain of effects, as on "The Presence," where her vocals are stripped bare of artifice -- or she's burying herself deep within. Both the pristine "Xanthe" and the psych-folk "Willow and Mallow" are songs so resonant and lovely that they could have been crafted by an AI bot let loose on the early
4AD catalog. That she mostly sticks to a familiar approach is perfectly okay, because as she proved in
Lush and, to a lesser extent,
Sing-Sing,
Anderson is a top-notch crafter of this kind of echoing, harmonically rich, and perfectly lovely dream pop. It may not be the second -- or third to be more precise -- coming of
Lush, but it's good to have
Anderson back and making music as pretty, sweetly sad, and ultimately comforting as
Pearlies. ~ Tim Sendra
