…said I with my ‘pocket music critic’ hat on, but when I took Lush to heart, it was with no such critical inclinations at play; rather, it was an instinctive response to the spangly yet oddly downbeat rush their music provides. If you hear them on the radio nowadays, or see them on a compilation cd, it’s probably by means of something off their second (middle) or third (last) lps — “Single Girl”, “500 (Shake Baby Shake)”, “Hypocrite” — and while all those songs are pretty fab, I don’t think they can touch the band’s Spooky days, when they were giving that glorious unmistakable ethereal 4ad sound its sweetest and perhaps most gossamer expression, all sparkling, shimmering, crashing guitars and swirling, reverberating walls of sound and vocals seemingly only lightly tethered to anything at all, and never more so than on “Nothing Natural”, which in addition to all of the above has an urgency and a momentum and, too, a breeziness along with which one can’t help but be swept along…
