Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

Brush is a five-man band from Seattle whose debut album Love Sublime is a refreshing break from the pop/indie sound that’s become fairly typical. They mix fantastic, catchy, poppy guitar rhythms with a piano and interesting synth and keyboard generated clicks and beeps to create track after track, a very eclectic debut album. BluDiamond is very funky, like something you’d hear at a club –or maybe more appropriately, a rave. Typical Man is entirely different, more poppy, soft-rock-esque, but still maintaining a distinct sound of their own: electronic music meets rock meets indie. Reminiscent of Peeping Tom, but a bit more mellowed out.

What makes them stand out most, though, are their lyrics. Track after track, their songs are filled with brilliant lines. The title track, for example, compares love to a “storm surge fifty feet high” or “the crest of a perfect wave”. The fifth song, Breathe In, Breath Out is one to play on repeat. The lines flow into one another beautifully and unambiguously: “your eyes, your lips, your cheek, your throat/in a moment I will choke/back this wave of desire”, giving the song several different connotations at once. The song immediately following Breathe In, Breathe Out is called Fallen and it explores lust in an atypical fashion. While still holding on to images like “your eyes pull me in” and “your body begging for sin”, they take the concept in a different direction – straight back to the iconic image of Eden and the apple and sin, saying “and I fall like the apple that’s too much for the branch to hold”. The song balances seamlessly a modern idea of lust with an older, more traditional – and religious -- view of the same.

Love Sublime deals with themes like love, an ended relationship, accepting oneself, desire (and not just sexual). It also covers a wide variety of sounds: from funky, club-worthy beats to slower, much softer rock songs. Billy Brush’s voice has a range of tones that are, in any case, smooth and unique.