Ltd ed screen printed sleeve
Belgian six-piece Luster wont be rushed. Featuring members of Mote, Joe Speedboat and Annelies Monseré, their debut has apparently been in the works for over a decade now. Side commitments blocking the path or perhaps the songs needed time to breathe? Whatever the reasons, it's uncanny that it should arrive at precisely the moment the kind of siren-song drone-folk hymnals it offers seem to be - how you say - de rigueur. The short paragraph that accompanies its release suggests it might be the "missing link between Mazzy Star, Pentangle, Broadcast and Enhet for Fri Musik", though I'm certainly getting a lot more Pentangle and EFFM (and Blod, for that matter) than the other two. As such, Luster take trad. folk and worship song, and rearrange it into droning structures that either assume a funereal march or oscillate through repeated cyclical phrases, which, if you're asking me, i'd say sit somewhere between the homely experimentalism of Eyes of the Amaryllis and the great MD After Hussain collaboration on Hive Mind. This originally came out at the tail end of June (when the copies we had disappeared before we could assess its merits), but seems perfectly suited to this current change in season. Ten years of autumn, eh? All the leaves are brown, and our souls are grey.
