Nugaze popsters Asobi Seksu flashed through Baltimore Friday night, and they brought with them a disc of acoustic versions of their normally oversaturated recordings. Compare the album versions:

Asobi Seksu: Thursday
Asobi Seksu: Familiar Light

With the acoustic versions:

Asobi Seksu: Thursday (Acoustic)
Asobi Seksu: Familiar Light (Acoustic)

The general consesus on their latest album, Hush, is that Asobi Seksu haven’t made any bounding leaps forward. The songs are still just as solidly crafted, and the melodies are a slow soak in a warm bubble bath. Yet, it feels somehow like an anti-climax. Citrus was often accused of being little more than shoegaze by-the-numbers, an implausible criticism given the fact that the songs themselves could stand on their own as bubblegum anthems. In response, Hush eschews the overuse of obvious shoegaze techniques and delves more introspectively into song structures and internal machine works.

Actually, I was hoping they’d go even further into shoegaze, and just oversaturate all decency and sanity out of the rolling tape, and do something crazy. I was hoping they’d produce songs that sounded like perfect pop gems as heard in a dream, which sound wrong when you wake up. Instead, they’re painfully awake, with an inoffensive measure of Dreampop dressing.

The acoustic versions prove that regardless of the production, the songs will have hooks, quirks, and treats, all of which take time to emerge. These are songs that grow on you. What’s missing is the immediate, crushing thunderbolt. They need to completely lose it next time. Distort all the meters and make the engineers throw up their hands and walk out of the studio. Record it through a tin can with string, and then loop the delay within an inch of its life. And then record a straight version and mix the two together. And then kill it and start over.