Album review
Blossoms performing in 2015. Photo: Phoebe Devereux/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Marriage is supposed to be where romance becomes ordinary. Blossoms have made an album out of the opposite idea.
On Songs From the Wedding Cake, the Stockport band is less interested in declarations than in the debris around them: a bad joke during an argument, a wife crying at The Kardashians, a car crash, a taxi ride, a numb arm, a trip to The Range. These are not traditionally exalted subjects. That is the point. Frontman Tom Ogden has built a record around the strange dignity of domestic detail.
The title comes from Stockport Town Hall, known locally as the Wedding Cake, where Ogden married Katie Donovan in 2021. Five years later, the sixth Blossoms album sounds less like a honeymoon souvenir than a dispatch from the part of marriage that begins after the photographs have been filed away. The record was produced by Shawn Lee and recorded to tape, but its real organizing principle is not vintage sound. It is familiarity.
Domestic scale
The best song titles make the joke before the song begins. “Joke About Divorce” sounds like it should be brittle, but the track treats a marital misfire with warmth rather than melodrama. “Husband” is even plainer. Ogden sings the word as if he is still getting used to its weight.
Blossoms have always been comfortable with hooks that arrive polished and smiling. What has changed is the subject matter. Earlier records often leaned on yearning, fantasy or stylized romance. Here, the band keeps returning to things that happen after love stops needing an introduction. “The Kardashians” is funny because its setting is banal, but the banality gives the sentiment more credibility. A person can be saved while watching bad television. Most lives happen at low volume.
That does not mean the album has abandoned spectacle. “Meet Me in Love” moves with the sort of bright, physical confidence Blossoms can summon almost casually. “Additional Driver,” featuring Declan McKenna, stretches a true story about a car accident into comic pop narrative. Rick Astley turns up on backing vocals elsewhere. The cameos do not feel like attempts to enlarge the record. They fit its slightly mischievous social world.
The danger is obvious. An album about contentment can become merely content. There are moments when the good mood smooths the edges too efficiently, when a neat chorus arrives before the song has had time to become awkward. Blossoms are so fluent at melodic pleasure that fluency can become a form of avoidance.
The deep end
The second half improves when the record lets devotion become less decorative. “Guts” and “Where Have You Been My Whole Life?” lean into sentiment without pretending sentiment is sophisticated. That lack of embarrassment is useful. Pop music has spent decades finding elaborate ways to make simple feelings look intelligent. Blossoms mostly let the feelings remain simple.
The closing “The Deep End” earns its length because it finally allows the album’s premise to become a little frightening. Marriage means repetition, but it also means dependency. The person who knows where the mugs are also becomes the person whose absence would rearrange the room. Love acquires infrastructure.
That is what makes Songs From the Wedding Cake more interesting than its cheerfulness first suggests. Blossoms are not trying to prove that marriage is glamorous. They are arguing that ordinary intimacy is already strange enough. The joke, the television, the car insurance and the floorboards are not interruptions to the love story. They are the love story.
