Blouse - Blouse - Album Review

Album Rating:

8

Today during my morning drive to Hades I was struck by how familiar Blouse's badass self titled debut was. Surely I'd heard these charmingly poppy dark wave jams before right? I began to get lost in lead singer Charlie Hilton's voice. Her ghostly tones had me scanning my brain's iTunes for a match. I locked on to a phrase that matched on "Controller". Who says years of drugs and alcohol kill brain functionality? Well I guess I kind of do because even though I was able to lock down the match I couldn't quite pinpoint the band where I recognized the sonic DNA. The only thing I had in my head was a song snippet. I decided to shut my brain off of all outside stimuli and I focused on the repeated snippet's two words:

"I tremble....I tremble"

The band's name was escaping me. I needed to focus harder.

As I smelled what i thought was my synapses burning I looked ahead to my windshield where I saw a sea of red lights growing ever closer.

I was going 80 miles per hour.

"I tremble....I tremble"

That smell was burnt rubber.

"I tremble..."

I jammed on my brakes and proceeded to feel my car decide it didn't feel like the normal run of the mill breaking...no instead the mighty Prius decided to show off and power slide into the luckily vacant car pool lane. Thank you a-hole LA drivers. MY car hockey stopped across the car pool lane at a 45 degree angle in front of the car that had been stopped in front of me.

"I tremble"

I looked up from my cloud of brakes and shattered dreams and saw a pigish woman sitting in her over-sized thrown of an SUV staring back at me totally unrattled. She gave me a bemused hand wave as to say "you clearly are in more of rush please cut ahead"

For the rest of the drive all I could hear was my heartbeat and the two words from the song pumping harder and harder in my head.

"I tremble"

Help, i'm Alive. Thank god.

fucking Metric I'll forgive you.

Blouse I'm not mad at you either because you've made a fantastic debut LP. Crafting poppy dark snyth driven 80's throw back jams would seem commonplace as we embrace the 4th quarter of 2011..but nothing about this album feels stale. I love everything about this album. "Time Travel" is especially tasty as it has a pumping edge to it that makes me think that if Molly Ringwald was cast in The Lost Boys she would have time traveled to 2011 to grab this darkwaver to do her patented Ringwald two step.

Yes readers I narrowly dodged Death's cold clutches today.  That said If this was the last record I was to hear before I hit that big SYFFAL in the sky I would have been ok with that. I love this album... Hard.