no scope review: underground pop as cool as dark denim “>
crushed. Photo by Ben Rayner
“Does your star still burn on its own? / Or did it shiver and fade long ago,” sings Bre Morell on “starburn,” the second track on crushed‘s debut album no scope. The light that arrives at our eyes from the night sky can take up to 2.5 million years to arrive at our retinas, each tiny, barely visible beam carrying an unimaginable burden of history. Having a deep feeling for the past’s triumphs and wreckage and sorting through it should be an impossible task; on no scope, crushed make it seem natural, looking effortlessly cool in the process.
It helps that both Morell and her bandmate Shaun Durkan have experience sifting through the sands of time. Morell fronts the operatic dreampop band Temple of Angels while Durkun helped set the stage for the current shoegaze revival with his former band Weekend. no scope is considerably more of a genre warp: there are tracks like “cwtch,” where Death Cab for Cutie vocals meet turn-of-the millenium radio pop, and the blown-out anime end credits theme “weaponx.” Fractured drum breaks are scattered across the album like fractured diamonds, landing perfectly in place for an album that feels like a party at the end of history.
