Send "Blouse " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 “Hello Cleveland! We are BLOUSE and tonight we’re gonna rock you, erm, tonight”. As monikers go, Blouse isn’t going to strike fear into the souls of doting parents or incite knee-jerk holy joes’ to instigate emergency meetings down at the town hall before commandeering Billy Bob’s steamroller to destroy every last trace of this “Surely Satanic” band’s existence. No. Blouse is a cutesy, frilly-pink-with-pigtails My Little Pony band name. But think twice before laying out the cream tea and scones Vicar, for it’s a bit of a ‘fiendishly trojan horse’-style band name too. Rum doings are afoot as, like a bellyful of crafty Greeks polishing their knives, Portland’s Blouse like to play in the shadows.Yes, this Blouse isn’t just fashioned from soft silks and emblazoned with tasteful multi-coloured paisley, but is more dead-eyed synth pop stained by betrayal, regret and shattered dreams; and what sounds like several decades buried under a provincial discothèque “Somewhere oop North”. A freshly tailored début this may be, but Blouse feels familiar, fitted, but ice cold to the touch. It’s dreamy, British indie pop cut from vintage cloth (‘78 to ‘91) but reflected by a future generation gazing back inquisitively through a thrift-store kaleidoscopic prism. It looks like indie synth-pop, feels like indie synth-pop but seems dusty, faded, torn. “Firestarter” (no, not that one) marks the first pawprint on the catwalk; all swirly, shoegazy haziness beefed-up with low-slung Gothic bassline and cryptic situationist musings. “Let’s forget about the ceiling / it’s just made of stone”, offers singer Charlie Hilton, whose forlorn fairy vocals weave a compelling, little girl lost narrative throughout. Like the whole record, it’s fiendishly danceable in a smoky “Tuesday Nights’ Paint It Black; The Electro Goth & Alternative Disco - Cider Half-Price All Nite”- stylee. The driving “Time Travel” - a futurist felling of The Cure’s “A Forest” – picks up the pace just as the pills kick in, “Aah, aah, I was in the future yesterday but it looked nothing like this”. Perfect for striking your best Debbie Harry poses. All resplendent in a black plastic binbag dress, wraparound shades, fingerless pastel gloves and nonchalantly shuffling like Frankenstein’s monster on a conveyor belt. Somewhere, Andy Warhol says “Wow”....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| I often return to this line from Simon Reynolds' Retromania: "Unlike digital formats, analogue degrades through overuse: each listener kills the sound she loves." There's a certain comfort in that kind of reciprocity, and anyone who's ever accidentally reset the listening history on their iTunes library and felt like they'd wiped a part of their identity clean is familiar with the digital world's maddening indifference to our affection. With that observation, Reynolds hits on the unifying and fundamentally human allure of chillwave, lo-fi, smear-pop, and any other kind of contemporary music that makes a conscious choice in an Auto-Tuned world to sound less than pristine. It's music trying to approximate the grubby, hopelessly destructive way we love books, records, and each other. Like a pre-owned Delorean or a Berlin cassette slowly decaying in the bargain bin, Portland trio Blouse's self-titled debut comes to us sounding like it's already been colored by somebody else's use. Though it's got an unabashedly Reagan-era sound, it's the record's almost pathological obsession with the past that places it so squarely in the now. Any of its 10 tracks could sit comfortably on pretty much anyone's 2010s playlist: it broods like a lower-fi version of Charli XCX's Cold War-tinged tunes, it beams through cloudy dark like John Maus' murky pop, and it even boasts a song called "Videotapes" on which the synths sound like warping videotapes....full text |
| Avclub |
| “I was in the future yesterday,” Blouse’s Charlie Hilton sings on “Time Travel,” the standout track from the Portland, Oregon-based synth-pop trio’s self-titled debut. The feeling of being unstuck in time isn’t unique to Blouse, and neither are the record’s ’80s movie soundtrack reference points. From M83 to numerous boilerplate chillwave bands to Drive, the sound of chilly keyboards, mechanical rhythms, and murmuring vocals are once again popular signifiers for melancholic self-involvement. Blouse is too late to the party for any of this, no matter how well executed, to sound novel. But Blouse does have enough worthwhile hooks to not seem totally redundant. Much of the album’s catchiness comes courtesy of bassist Jacob Portrait, who supplies a zigzagging pulse to “Into Black” that almost shakes Hilton out of her sleepy warbling. On “Videotapes,” Portrait’s driving bassline keeps the song moving forward amid some woozily disorienting keyboard vamping. Even at its best, however, Blouse never rises above the level of alluring background music. A stronger, more convincing singer would have brought Blouse into greater focus. But perhaps the blurry, half-remembered and half-imagined presentation is the point. Blouse is a record made for wandering inside the mind, where memory and dreams meet to form a less concrete kind of reality. ...full text |
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