Heartbreaking Bravery

Editor’s Note: There’s been a month-long gap in coverage, thanks to near-incessant travel and other extenuating circumstances. The following run of posts that contain this note will be posts that should have appeared sometime within the past several weeks. Use these posts as an opportunity to catch up to the present release cycle or to simply discover some new music. Either way, enjoy.

Not a long of bands have captured my attention this year as quickly as Plush. “Sheer Power” landed them in this site’s’ 50 Best Songs of 2016’s First Quarter list. Every piece of additional material that’s come out of the band’s camp since the release of that song has proven to be irrepressibly winsome. The quartet takes cues from the best of shoegaze, basement pop, surf, noise, post-punk, and dream-pop to conjure up music that has an inherently majestic sweep.

Each of the five songs that comprise Please, the band’s latest EP, are tinged with some of the characterizing qualities of epics, from the seemingly limitless scope to the penchant to sound as if their music is hopelessly reaching skyward, grasping at impossible boundaries. All five coalesce into a release that occasionally resembles a spiritual journey more than a traditional music release. By the time “Sheer Power”, the EP’s penultimate track, hits its apex, the band’s nearing the transcendent.

“Fixes” provides the EP’s smokey epilogue and ultimately cements its standing as one of 2016’s most extraordinary releases (so far), to the point where predicting Please will surface again in the year-end mentions doesn’t even feel like that bold of a prediction. Please is exceptional in just about every measurable sense and the band executes it flawlessly. Here’s hoping it gets the kind of glowing reception it deserves.   

Listen to Please below and pick up the tape from Father/Daughter here.