Blossom

Lustre's sound is no longer completely unknown: melodic, melancholic, slow, cosmic. However, only the album's title can lead us to other less emotionally heavy universe, and it's true. "Blossom" continues to express the musicality of the project through the characteristics immediately mentioned above, but this time the musician offers us a brighter musical canvas than usual. It's not that the synthesizers have changed their tone dramatically, but there is a greater spiritual lightness that contrasts with the darker, quasi-depressive landscapes that commonly emerge in the project's discography. The introspective side continues to be the peak of Nachtzeit's entire musical journey, and this is mainly conveyed through the highly repetitive sections which, in spite of everything, do not truly hypnotize, but calm and relax - I even think that this always was his aim instead of channeling negative energies; deep yes, but not negative.

The sound layers are composed by various arrangements orchestrated in synthesizers and I venture to say that it is after 7 years that Nachtzeit manages to unite all these arrangements in perfect harmony. The guitar continues to be the device that forms a whole wall of compact sound; but let's face it, it is much less used here. The great development is about the position that drums finally take as their own: it is much more present, more elaborated (although nothing shiny) and is no longer that simple tool to mark the tempo.

Lustre's recipe has not changed and I believe it will never change. Lustre is this, album after album, but I believe it will keep the most hardcore fans - however, it is possible that many followers begin to forget or stop listening so often precisely due to the use of the same ingredients and musical directions. Even so, and without neglecting what was said, "Blossom" is another well-made album that will fill every room with its color promising to travel to the cosmos through our own inner self.

Originally written at www.ultraje.pt

Lustre continues on his path of composing atmospheric blackened ambient comfort music with fifth album and umpteenth recording "Blossom". Like "Phantom", an earlier 2015 release, "Blossom" starts promisingly and for a moment I begin to hyperventilate, sure that my deity has finally answered my prayers and directed the man behind Lustre to break out of his own comfort zone and do something a little different with his Lustre project, like add some live instrumentation to the synths running on autopilot or switch to laptop glitch-electronics instead of the synths running on autopilot. For a brief while, the music echoes my hopes: it seems bright and hopeful, in a subdued sort of way, and the cold space tones have an air of wonder about them.

The steely acid guitar noise shower and the relentless mechanical percussion beats then kick in, and from then on the Lustre machine is in full operation. By now, familiar with the way Lustre recordings work, I usually watch out for moments where the machine takes a break and the only thing present is the cold wintry ambience through which odd stray tones and fragile melodies might be caught like rabbits on the road staring at the headlights of the oncoming semi-trailer that will send the bunnies straight to Carrot Heaven. It is in the melodies and the atmosphere that Lustre man Nachtzeit exercises some real creativity: admittedly when they're repeated over and over the tunes become New Age banal but at least for a few rotations they have a cool sharp jewel-like edge to them and even sound a bit chilling and alien.

In this respect, the best track of this set is Part 3 which features extended passages of all-synth tone wash and drone, with very minimal guitar or percussion accompaniment. Part 4 is not too bad though the ongoing bass droning is heavy for the more delicate melodies and quivery tones. The ambience of this track could have been changed to give the music more of a clear, sharp and fresh-sounding edge.

Like previous Lustre recordings, this album is very monotonous and repetitive, and could do with editing for length. I don't find these recordings very hypnotic and absorbing as they are intended to be, probably because the rhythms and beats are so heavy, clunky and laborious. The good music that is present is drowned out by clunk and repetition that renders everything it comes across into kitsch and banality.

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.