Building on their sound from Grandfeathered (2016), Russian shoegaze band Pinkshinyultrablast offers a melodically sweet, and harmonically dense single in “Find Your Saint.”
As is typical of the shoegaze genre, the songs lyrics are almost entirely intelligible — so much so that they may be in a different language. This adds to the song much more than it takes away, however. The vocal melody sounds angelic, like watching honey drip into a hot cup of tea. This sweet sound is helped by the cryptic lyrics, whose vowel sounds are soft to the ear. However, the mystical lack of meaning in words creates a sense of unease in the song that builds unresolved tension for the full three minutes and twenty seven seconds.
Other parts of the song serve only to recreate or enhance this effect. The blast style drum beat creates a mesmerizing syncopation with the vocals, as they swell between the snare and the kick. The other harmonic elements of the beat, presumably a guitar and a synth (though also hard to identify), play major progressions in their higher range, which is in many ways sweet — I’d believe that this song was sampled from a music box. However, a fuzzy distortion applied on almost all elements of the track makes the sound both vintage, and subconsciously off.
The song builds energy into its second half as the drums go heavier, but the build goes nowhere. This song is unconventional in many ways, and shows it’s shoegaze roots. Anyone who enjoys the genre will surely love this track.
