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Ban the Bland: The Brutal Beauty of Lush,
Guitar Player, June 1991.
Emma Anderson & Miki Berenyi, Guitar
Player, September 1994.
All You Need Is Life, Alternative
Press, June 1996.
Interview with Emma, Spleen Fanzine, 1994.
Ban The Bland: The Brutal Beauty of Lush
There's a blissful balance to Lush, a two-man/two-woman quartet hailed by some critics as saviors of English guitar-based pop. As heard on Gala (a 4AD/Reprise LP that combines the band's Scar and Mad Love EPs, the latter produced by the Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie), Lush's subtle, seductive sound weaves extremes of rawness and fragility into a sprawling musical mosaic, a paradoxical mixture of ethereally beautiful and brutally atonal guitar textures.
Singer/guitarists Emma Anderson and Miki Berenyi, bassist Steve Rippon, and drummer Chris Acland have been performing together since 1988. The women knew almost nothing about electric guitars when the group came together at London's Polytechnic University. "We used to use more distortion when we first started," recalls Anderson, "mainly because we couldn't play a note--we'd hit the distortion pedal to cover our mistakes. The songwriting has progressed from the early days, when it was just a matter of stringing four chords together that sounded okay. Our growth on guitar came from our ideas of what we wanted to do with the songs."
Anderson handles most of the melody lines that comprise Lush's spacious sound, trading off of Berenyi's scattershot strums. Both players are self-taught, aside from a few acoustic lessons Emma had at 16. Anderson conjures soaring, swirling textures by running her '68 Fender Strat and '59 Jazzmaster through a Roland GP-16 multiprocessor and Marshall ICM 800 2x12 combo amps wired in stereo. Berenyi pumps her '67 Rickenbacker 12-string through a similar configuration.
Anderson and Berenyi look forward to taking their playing to higher plateaus, but any growth, they insist, will be specifically geared to avoid clichés. "We're not very technical people," explains Anderson. "I know I still have a lot to learn, and I'm still sort of teaching myself, but I'm quite happy with what I can do at the moment. I haven't got any great ambitions to be the next Jimi Hendrix or anything like that; I just try to be as inventive as possible. This band doesn't have any egos about our playing--we just do what we do and it all fits in quite nicely."
For the next album, Anderson anticipates more technical dabbling, possibly with MIDI gear: "We want to try out a lot more effects and experiment more in the studio. We're going to play with sequencers and drum machines and try to get a little more technically minded. We're definitely not into overproduction, but we want to make some interesting new sounds. We don't want to bland out."
Darren Ressler, Guitar Player June 1991
Why would a band call itself Lush? Because their music is luxuriously laden with layers of dreamy angelic melodies, or are they simply a pack of boisterous, drunken louts who make loud, rude noises? Their latest album, Split, suggests that both explanations may be true. Split shares moments of hypnotic, resplendent pleasure-punk and hard, lardy angst-pop. "We've always had the two extremes," says Emma Anderson, who shares guitar and vocal duties with Miki Berenyi. "We've gone back to that really, but it wasn't a conscious decision."
Split, easily the British dream-pop band's most varied, cocksure, and commercial effort, follows Spooky by two-and-a-half years. During that time the band toured heavily and spent several months working on demos prior to going into the studio. Berenyi notes that the biggest difference between Split and Spooky is that the band opted to use amps and microphones instead of recording everything through effects processors. "The two approaches are completely opposite," she explains. "Every single sound on Spooky had an effect on it. On Split we wanted a live sound. That was partly because when we made Spooky we weren't a particularly good live band. After Spooky we went on tour for a whole year and actually got reasonably good at playing live. So many people said, 'You sound so different than you do on your record--it's so much more powerful.' We thought it might be nice to record an album that actually sounds like us, not like how our producer decides we should sound."
Berenyi, with her dayglo locks, exotic looks, and lead vox, is the focal point of Lush's
luster. Her playful yet assertive demeanor is enhanced by her seeming disregard for equipment names and model numbers. "Didn't use a phaser this time," she laughs. "I've got a Mesa Boogie, a little combo thing. Then a variety of pedals--over-drive, distortion, chorus, digital delay." Guitars? "I used to use a Rickenbacker, but I think I'll get rid of it. The strings are too close together. I used a Gibson ES-335 12-string, an Epiphone 12-string, which is almost identical to the Gibson, and Firebirds--the cheaper version. The expensive one goes in one direction, and the cheaper one goes in the other direction."
Anderson soberly lists her gear affections. "I've got a Fender Telecaster Thinline, a Fender Strat--a Hendrix reissue--and a '59 Jazzmaster that I bought in L.A. It used to belong to someone who played in a gospel band. My other guitar is an SG with a Melody Maker neck. When I bought it they said that it was something that had been put together by someone, and it wasn't worth much money. Then I found out afterwards that Gibson had actually made some like that. It was my first guitar. I've got a Mesa Boogie Studio preamp with a 395 power amp and two 1x12 speaker cabinets in a stereo setup. I used to use a Roland GP-16, but it broke down all the time, so I bought an Alesis Quadraverb, though I haven't sat down with the manual and worked it all out yet. I also use an overdrive pedal and a DigiTech Whammy Pedal."
"I'm the rhythm guitarist and Emma's the lead guitarist," states Berenyi. "Most of our songs are not massive bursts of guitar solos. But if there is a ten-second solo in there, Emma will be the one playing it."
"I still wouldn't call myself a lead guitarist in the traditional sense of the word," protests Anderson, who first took lessons at 16 in college. "I never thought, 'Hey, I'm going to be Jimi Hendrix when I grow up.' I never aspired to be a technically brilliant player. I think that helps you develop your own style." Anderson became Lush's lead guitarist by default. In an early version of Lush, Berenyi and Anderson shared equal guitar roles, but after the band's original vocalist quit Miki concentrated on singing, and Emma took over most of the guitar responsibilities.
Anderson explains that the songs she writes are also the result of happenstance. "I just get a tune in my head, and I build it up. I do it when I'm washing up or doing something really stupid. Miki can sit down with a guitar and write a song. I can't." Many of Anderson's ideas come to her in her sleep, fitting for a band whose music is tagged "dream pop." When she awakens, she sings the melodies into a tape recorder. She later builds the songs, figuring out vocal harmonies, writing both guitar parts and a bass line, and formulating ideas about the drum pattern.
Berenyi's songs usually start with the lyrics, which she compares to contemplations scribbled in a diary. "We write about stuff that's personal, that's happened to us. I use the word 'contemplative,' but that sounds dull. The songs are generally about relationships, but not necessarily boyfriend/girlfriend ones. That's an easy category to put things in. As soon as you write about a relationship, a lot of people assume that it's got to be about a man, or a partner. They're actually about friends or parents, people we know, or moments, things that have happened."
Anderson and Berenyi hope that it won't take another two-and-a-half years before Lush's next album is completed. "We're going to tour for six months and then get started on the next record," comments Anderson. "We've become a much better band. Everything has started to jell. We just want to keep the momentum going."
Chris Gill, Guitar Player September 1994
For those expecting Lush to remain immersed in a world of sweetness and light, their new album Lovelife may come as a bit of a shock. With its spiked heels dug deep into a much more straightforward sound, Lovelife is stripped of superfluous "prettiness" and "sounds."
Thus, the third full-length recording by the quartet-founders/singers/guitarists/songwriters Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson, bassist Phil King and drummer Chris Acland--shows them making substantial progress, adding elements as varied as the horn section that shows up on "Olympia," to a visit from Michael Jackson's biggest fan, Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker, dueting with Miki on "Ciao!"
However, with the recent success of such Britpop groups as Blur and Oasis--and the impending success of Pulp--the sound of Lovelife may seem to some as more a case of shrewd market analysis than a legitimate statement of musical growth.
"Fuck 'em them," snarls Berenyi at the accusation. "We are really not a very commercially minded band, and it's not like we ever sat down and said, 'We've really got to write a hit.' It's certainly not a contrived album, and I think it's a fairly natural progression from Spooky through to Split and onto this album.
It's not like we came out with two Spookys and suddenly came out with this album; there wasn't this huge turn-around in the way we write songs or records. It's just a progression."
Unfortunately, Split went largely unheard, both in America and in England. Having viewed the essentially unfinished Spooky as an abortive, but noble, first effort ("Robin [Guthrie, producer] just sort of got tired of doing it, so we stopped when he stopped," says Berenyi with a half-hearted laugh), the band nonetheless rode onto a Lollapalooza gig, boxloads of record sales, and an adoring clutch of press accolades. Feeling they could use this momentum to make the album they sought to make the first time around, they recorded Split, a record much closer to the live sound Lush had developed over three years of touring. Satisfied with the album, they were shocked at the negative reaction it got. Coupling bad press attention with an apathetic manager ("He would come over here and spend a week in L.A. out of his mind, getting pissed with Elastica or something, never even dealing with the label, and then come back and tell us that we were on the verge of being dropped because nobody at the label liked us," grumbles Berenyi, "when it was him they didn't like.") Split fared none too well, leaving many with the impression that the band was still toiling in the "la-la-la" realm of angelic vocals and phased guitars that had become rather tiring by that point.
"Which is really unfortunate," says Anderson. "It's really odd, because a lot of people think we started off like we did on Spooky, when a lot of the sounds on this record--that straightforward pop sound--is what we were doing very early on, like on Scar. We're certainly not trying anything drastically new.
"But people think we are and there have been interviews where they've suggested that maybe we're attempting to jump on some sort of Britpop bandwagon or something. But we've always written pop songs, and it's not like our last record was all these soundscapes with floaty vocals and whatever and now we're putting out an album like Blur's."
Defensive as she may sound, Anderson does have a point in that Lush have been writing pop songs of similar texture since they first began playing together. However, the directness of those songs is much more readily apparent on Lovelife, probably due in part to the production by the band's live soundman, Pete Bartlett, who enthusiastically captured the power of Lush's largely effect-less live performance with Berenyi and Anderson's picture-perfect harmonies intact. It's an uneasy approach--filled with propulsive hooks and crystalline vocals--that certainly won't appeal to folks looking for a little womb-rock, but live is where the band seems to feel most comfortable. The result: Lovelife is their most natural-sounding record to date.
Logically, armed with an album's worth of such stage-ready material, Lush take to the road starting in April for an American 4AD touring campaign dubbed "Shaving the Pavement" that features the desolate swoon of Mojave 3, and the somewhat incongruous metallic rock of Scheer.
"I'm looking forward to it, actually," says Anderson, addressing the potential three-band style clash. "I don't think [Scheer] is really heavy metal. They're definitely heavy rock, but I think the vocals and the way they write their songs really distinguishes them."
"Plus," offers Berenyi, "it's not like we've never played with heavy-metal bands before. After all we have played with Dreamgrinder!"
Sweetness and light, indeed.
Jason Ferguson, Alternative Press June 1996
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