Things Luminous EP - Crush Buildings

Things Luminous EP

Crush Buildings
Rifle Eyes Records/Bandcamp.

SCQ Rating: 76%

With all of our possessions loaded into a U-haul truck, we pulled into Ottawa one night in late December looking to breathe fresh air after two years of Toronto smog. Mapping our way through its snow-covered downtown streets, I was also hungry to explore Ottawa’s local independent scene… something that, eleven months later, I’m still trying to locate the boundaries of. Thankfully the first band I’ve grabbed onto happens to be, in hindsight, one of our capital’s most promising; Crush Buildings refuses to be pinned to a particular music-tag and their recent EP vindicates this refusal to narrow their sights.

Although ‘Blueteeth’ and ‘Swinging the Lantern’ offer complex indie-rock compositions that deviate tempos and wallow in rich instrumentation, they’re just one side of Things Luminous EP’s understated tour de force. Electronic textures drift ‘The Minutes’ in a shoegaze direction that nevertheless fails to plateau the band’s creativity, as their euphoric slowdown at the bridge manages to deepen the track’s emotional core. Crush Buildings avoid jumping so far out of their comfort zones that they hinder their EP’s scope, thereby smartly leaving ‘The Minutes’ a spacey centerpiece around two couplets of original indie-rock. Rarely can a band – especially one this young – convey so much passion into a twenty-minute EP, but Crush Buildings’ songwriting affords that maturity. It’s anyone’s guess where the band will go from this point but one thing’s for sure: Ottawa could use far more records as unique as Things Luminous.