At least they’ve given up trying to manufacture viral moments with a garden centre gorilla. Their fibreglass fascination on Gary felt sweet for a time, but it’d be a generous read of Blossoms’ previous album to suggest it’s a moment where the band became obsessed with a niche that would never carry an album. They go a touch broader and swing again on Songs from the Wedding Cake. Ten songs that feel a little reheated because we’ve moved on from the subject matter. Gone are the days when a kooky song like The Kardashians or Uma Thurman can win over an audience that wants more than pop culture riffs that’d feel a touch dated a decade ago. The tracklist reads as bullet points to a doomed wedding speech, if you give Blossoms a bit of help in lifting such a theme. What remains across Songs from the Wedding Cake is what stays the same for the rest of Blossoms’ discography. Likeable music without much of an impact.
Opening song Joke About Divorce has all the upbeat thrills of a funk-driven band but nothing much to say. Such is the case for many Blossoms songs, but you’d think they would, at some point, fancy adding some depth to their likeable sound. Songs from the Wedding Cake is full of that, an album where the filler material expected of an indie rock band is, in fact, all ten songs. Again, likeable tones on the passive-sounding Husband, but nothing much of anything. Frontman Thomas Ogden has written up his anxieties and excitement from his wedding but nothing much comes of it. It feels deeply personal without the personable experiences expected of living your life and then presenting it for songwriting fodder. Nothing sticks. Songs from the Wedding Cake is filled with songs that drag on. Husband and Meet Me in Love feel like such trivial, basic concepts. They sound instrumentally no different to what the band has already done, lyrically indifferent. That, more than ever, feels intentional.
Look through the featured artists and those who worked with Blossoms in some way for Songs from the Wedding Cake and it looks like a time capsule for passive, likeable indie rock. Rick Astley appeared in a music video for the opening song; Declan McKenna provides additional vocals to Additional Driver. It feels as though the world has passed Blossoms and their collaborators by. Their escapism isn’t all that earth-shattering anymore; their playful tease of modern times being a little tough to face at present just not enough to win over a listener. The Kardashians is a miserable reality check. You may feel sick having to listen to a loved-up album after losing out yourself, but at least being alone isn’t as boring as the channel-hopping dregs heard on Songs from the Wedding Cake. It’s worse to be inoffensive and middle-of-the-road than it is to drop a clanger. Blossoms has stuck to the middle for years, but it comes to a head here. The Kardashians is strikingly ironic, given Ogden writes of never giving in to complacency. It sounds as though he has a little, though.
You can’t repeat “having fun” and expect fun to come from that. Blossoms’ cardinal sin is believing their wonderful instrumental expressions are enough to build around. But they feel more like jams that could lead somewhere, rather than fully conscious experiences. Fall Into You may win you over through the sentimentality of it all and the repetition of the song’s title, but there’s not much else to it or the rest of the material on Songs from the Wedding Cake. Where there should be warmth, those little flickers of why we fall in love and what me make of it when we do, is nothing. Blossoms sound relatively passive to the joys of intimacy on Songs from the Wedding Cake, an album that feels as stifled and awkward as bumping into distant relatives at a wedding.
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