Released March 29th, 2011 by Perennial Records, Peripheral Star is an EP to be reckoned with, and its craftsmanship deserves more than a passive listen from the music community at large. Broken Water, the three-piece from Olympia, Washington, consisting of Kanako-drums/vocals, Abigail-bass/vocals, Jon-guitar/vocals, have composed some of the most well-balanced, enthralling shoegaze rock to come from the Northwest, or the rest of the nation for that matter, in a long time.
Seattle is not known for producing shoegaze bands of exceptional merit- traditionally, and oftentimes derisively, the Seattle scene has been depicted by music critics as the comically woodsy, rootsy home of acoustic guitar fingerpickers and gentle harmonizers belting out their forest-loving tunes in picturesque locales abundant around Washington. The astronomical rise to international fame of The Head and the Heart do nothing in service of changing this image.
The song "Kansas" opens with an ominous, vaguely foreboding bass riff that dominates the vibe as Jon’s sharp guitar slashes into life, follows a descending scale, and then cuts again. In mood, this song, and much of what Broken Water do, is related to the whole of the very great album by Apse entitled Spirit. What Apse failed to do at times that Broken Water is highly skilled at doing is adding enough muscle to their compositions, adding the split-the-sky eruptions that rise above the beautiful, warbling din, thereby breaking the listener through the tranquil or torpid threshold that can beset anyone listening to large doses of music.
"Okane No" absolutely explodes with guitar-string-bending riffs swimming in reverb, and not just the placidly adopted reverb sounds of many bands in this genre, but the kind of labored over sound that has a specific place, is used for a specific purpose. Broken Water’s sound teeters on a precipice that demands a high level of skill- their music is a tempered chaos, augmented by exceptional song-writing abilities that have a knack for movement within music, all combing to deliver high-impact listening bliss.