Water Margin — Gleaming Cursed
Kingfisher Bluez
5.4 — Sadness without texture
In a landscape where nostalgia often functions as a crutch more than a compass, Water Margin’s Gleaming Cursed arrives with the faint aroma of mid-to-late-’90s emo wafting through its pores. The distortion is dialed-in, the vocals are cloaked in just enough reverb to evoke an aching distance. But while Gleaming Cursed earnestly sets out to honor its influences, it rarely transcends them—and worse, it seems almost content to never try.
From the first track, it’s clear the band reveres the past, but reverence alone doesn’t animate. Water Margin gestures toward the emotional weight of acts like Mineral or Christie Front Drive, but forgets what made those bands stick: hooks. There’s a curious absence of tension and release here—everything feels flatlined, coasting on mood without ever building to anything memorable. Choruses pass like scenery glimpsed from a slow-moving train: similar, grey, and ultimately indistinct.
None of this is to say the record is bad—it’s not. In fact, it’s frustratingly pleasant. The production is warm, the musicians competent, and the overall effect is… fine. You can do your laundry to it. You can half-listen to it on a walk. You can wonder, five minutes after it ends, whether you actually heard it at all. It’s the kind of album that invites you to feel something, but never bothers to provoke it.
There’s a kind of ironic tragedy in a record called Gleaming Cursed being neither gleaming nor cursed—just sort of there. If Water Margin wants to be more than another footnote in the emo revival canon, they’ll need to dig deeper next time. Nostalgia can be a launchpad, but it shouldn’t be a ceiling.
