The name Pinkshinyultrablast can immediately bring several ideas to mind. The first of these would be the “thunder pop” group, and the second would be the Astrobrite record from which the band have taken their name from. Of course, another image can pop into the head of those that hear that name, usually after having heard it repeated several times to make sure it’s not part of a fever dream. It sounds like a move straight from a Japanese manga, one following the inspiration of Dragonball‘s kamehameha.
Lyubov Soloveva, vocalist of Pinkshinyultrablast, claims that the inspiration to take that name didn’t lie in the band’s love for pop culture. Speaking with PopMatters, she says that the name has a “nonsensical” quality to it, one that stuck even with its unsure nature being tagged onto the band’s EP Happy Songs for Happy Zombies. It’s a word that stuck in its own “cloud of interpretations”.
Appropriately enough, “cloudy” is a word that fits the poppy sound of this Russian band. Still off the heels of their first LP Everything Else Matters, which feels like a hopeful reply to Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters”, Pinkshinyultrablast have released their sophomore record Grandfeathered this year, an album that has a complexity to its brightness. From the rock guitars that herald celebration and cherry blossoms in “Glow Vastly” to the blissful unreality that is “The Cherry Pit”, their sophomore release wades the same waves Cocteau Twins swam. To Soloveva, they were also thunder pop — they were also the immense wall off the fringes of dream pop and shoegaze.
Pinkshinyultrablast’s relationship with art is part of what defines their colorful image in the spectrum of sound. The artwork that graces the covers of their two albums were interpretations done by Facultative.Works, friends of the band. Colors and geometry become talking points along the context of interpretation; an effervescent, unified flow would be the inspiration. “[Geometry is] like the juxtaposition of our sensibility and music and luscious sensibilities of design.” From the cover of their latest release, Pinkshinyultrablast’s interpreted sensibilities are in a spectrum of colors — from the obtuse black block to the freakishly technicolored soap, sound becomes represented as solid, dense, and bright.
Nathan Fake’s track “Grandfathered” lends its inspiration to the band, much like Astrobrite’s album. Pinkshinyultrablast says that their album and Fake’s track have a quality to it that’s “grand and operatic.” Positioning -fathered into -feathered says a lot about the lightness of some sections, while also weighing in on the heavy. In such a way, the feathers that could represent such a sound are the ones found in the trick question about whether one would carry twenty pounds of bricks or the same weight of feathers. Yet one of those choices seems like a much pleasant way of being smothered. This pleasure is heightened with the Japanese culture that permeates through the band’s catalogue.
Whether it’s Japanese music or Japanese culture in general, the band’s expansive sound draws from some eastern modes of art. Lyubov Soloveva, who studied the language as a kid, announces that the band listens to a wide sort of weird pop, as well as electronic artists, such as Cornelius, from Japan. Whatever her music sounds like, it’s drawing from whatever her and the band listen to at the time. Roman recently admitted in a Reddit AMA that he was listening to powerviolence at the time, so absorbing the facets of such a genre and putting in into a third project would show the band’s strength through inspiration, while also creating their own twist on such sounds, of course. In the cloud of reference which Japan is a part of, Soloveva mentions particulars:
“‘Glow Vastly” would be in a zombie movie; ‘Molkky’ would be in a Miyazaki film; and then our Japanese additional tracks that aren’t on the main record … would probably in a ninja movie.” In this admission, the band also express their desire to have their music featured in animation, matching with pieces of art whose sensibilities match with theirs.
Part of this sensibility, at least regarding Grandfeathered is the feeling of wakefulness, dreams, and unreality. The album feels like something out of a David Lynch piece, making it “Lynchean”, as she claims. There is a truth to this when one takes in the soothing, yet wanderlust-desiring tones that Soloveva sings from. While lyrics might be difficult to decipher, the band demonstrate their collective confusion within one’s wakefulness through loud, yet appropriately disorienting melodies. This record defines the sound of putting “the pieces back together to become yourself again.” The dream and wakefulness become juxtaposed to create what dream pop wants to be; PSUB make such a genre’s sound more thunderous. In this thunder is the clash of something different, something that puts thematic codes in the backseat.
Soloveva pits the band’s songs as a clash within themselves. Like the album art which shines and blots in its shiny and lustre, so too does structure become that which is highlighted. “A lot of songs are kind of two pieces that are like a bridge,” she says, “but don’t necessarily correlate with each other in a poppy way, where we go back to the chorus.” Discussions of thematic clashes are contentious issues because they put the singer and their vocals at their forefront. The product of instrumental pieces becomes secondary unless a whole piece is instrumental. “Harmony and structure of a song are as much of a narrative as a lyrical composition,” she says, bringing up musician Dan Deacon to show focus and her point. The band want to show the palette of color by reflecting it through unison, like, as she claims, Stereolab were trying to do.
The discussion of melodic and harmonic structure is what Pinkshinyultrablast want to put at the forefront, making it so that sound is communicated back and forth in an equal way. The palette of sound is theirs, and despite not shedding their skin too lyrically, the band demonstrate their strength through structure. Structure doesn’t become a mere tug of war between two parts, nor is it a vacuum where one section doesn’t listen to another. Though the band don’t go back after one part is over, it’s clear that they become pitted in their cloud of associations. This is where they find themselves, not in clarity, but in a beautiful haze.