Butterfly Case is Cuushe's second album, following on from Red Rocket Telepathy and the Girl You Know That I Am Here But The Dream EP, and it is out now on Japan's Flau label.
Cuushe is inspired by dreams and that is instantly obvious in the starry-eyed and dreamlike melodies. Fuzzy ambience, layers of melodic vocals and distortion form a dense sense of otherworldly desire. It gives the sense of being locked up in the sometimes forlorn, sometimes enraptured and ecstatic doodling and daydreaming of a teenager or the subject of a Wes Anderson or Sofia Copolla movie.
This tangibly emotional edge is never far for the surface, etched out in broad daylight on tracks such as I Love You, Swing Your Heart and I Miss You. When Cuushe is up the melodies are beautiful and uplifting, I Love You dizzy in an excitable and heady rush of bouncing synths, reverb and intense feelings of caring for someone that are delivered with a sense that they are tumbling out of her mouth simply because she can't hold them in any more. It is mirrored by the distraught and broken I Miss You - a track ice-like in sound, creaking like icebergs that move so slow whilst Cuushe deploys emotions through the tracks of her tears, obscured beneath the layers of production but still audibly hurting.
There are some more intensely upbeat moments too. The track Butterfly is a breathy and uplifting burst of energy that shines with driving bass lines and a catchy vocal hook, creating one of the album's most instantaneously pleasurable sugar hits.
It is the almost overbearing sense of the saccharine that holds Butterfly Case back if anything. Much like the movie directors she is likened to, Cuushe won't suit everyone's palate, the emotions too rich and the melodies too light to grab, yet it is hard not to love the dreamy naïveté she offers up.
Butterfly Case is out now on Flau. Available from Amazon.co.uk on CD and MP3 [affiliate links]. Spotify users can stream in full below: