3.4.22 by Matty McPherson
God bless the postal workers that have to put up with the label boss who shows up with an arm, leg, and nut’s worth of Luxury Elite cassettes for shipping. Any time the producer decides to log on and team up with a label for a new surprise, shit basically prints cash–as well as hundreds of postal labels (protip: use pirate ship). Naturally, if you blink you will miss the release; she’s been doing this for a decade and clearly has mastered what audience to court. This kind of MO is still running in vaporous circles as far as I know, and that Luxury Elite happens to have a quality control on the hype and her releases find themselves ending up on Crash Symbols (or in this case, Doom Trip), has tantalized me for a bit. It’s a sign of appreciation and trust, as well as a quality label/ethos endorsement. So naturally when blue eyeshadow popped on the feed only a dozen minutes after coming out I knew I’d be making a blind buy on my first luxury elite release.
Blue Eyeshadow finds us a decade into the project laying down mid-80s period synths, drum machines, and brass instruments looped into poptones with a kind of certainty parallel to what was afforded to Green Gartside. This took me out of my initial going-in projections; I had expected a more…glitched and vaped out vibe. Underneath the lushness there are moments as such scratching through the crevices, but it is first and foremost a piece of new golden instrumental dreams. It’s with that sonic language alone that the tape is able to succeed as a lovely pastiche–albeit one meta enough to practically become a perennial 80s pop tape that enacts its own Mandela effect; you know these songs by heart even if you have never heard them.
Yet, what more is being conveyed underneath these tracks that lyrics cannot warrant? Big sloppy dopamine rushing instrumentals can seem so one sided, but luxury elite swaggers in ways that perhaps suggests we’re bonded to these sounds and that they can articulate nuances that words might just really detract from. Abstracted and left to the listener, blue eyeshadow can at times be a touching treatise on romance in an abstracted, yet picturesque, aspiringly universal experience. From the blushing “psychic bond” and sensual “afternoon swim” to the jaded late-day haze of “commercial break” and the crystalline meandering of “empty lobby”; there’s a canvas of images to navigate your own memories within. A well warranted excursion giving me much to think about.
Edition of 200 SOLD OUT at Doom Trip Records (maybe more will show up later? Who knows!)
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