Maria Somerville: Luster review – a vivid and vital entry in the shoegaze revival
Maria Somerville’s second album of folk-tinged shoegaze arrives at an apposite time. TikTok has turned the genre into a lifestyle for alt teens, while the internet radio station NTS has made itself synonymous with hazy, deadpan underground pop. But the Irish musician’s sound feels distinctive: both slightly alienating – cool to the touch, unnervingly atmospheric – and slightly sexy, songs like Mayfly and Violet moving with an alluring looseness that often eludes experimental indie music of this stripe.
Simple but evocative lyrics suggest an endearing curiosity about the world: “Sometimes the sky / Invites me to truly be / Myself more than it could actually be,” she sings on Trip, a curiously circular phrase that feels tentative and certain at the same time. Somerville sings in hushed tones surrounded by chilly production, but when you listen closely, these songs reveal themselves to be unusually swollen with texture and detail: harps twinkle like broken glass and baggy breakbeats reverberate widely, seemingly recorded through a bedroom wall. She has an expansive purview: part of the thrill of Luster is listening closely enough to pick up on the traces of pop, hymnal, trip-hop and experimental electronic music that lies beneath.
It’s this approach that makes Luster so vividly alive: this is no dusty genre exercise. It was inspired by Somerville’s home of Connemara, and she occasionally luxuriates in nuanced, evocative field recordings, as on closer October Moon, when she samples the sound of waves at low tide. But outside those moments of specificity, it feels like a representation of the expansive beauty of solitude, and the beautiful chaos that can be found in quiet moments: a symphony of small ideas rendered in the colours of a sunset.
