Godflesh were my last favorite band. Meaning that when I discovered them around the turn of the 90's my tastes hadn't yet broadened to the point where having a "favorite band" became meaningless. Honestly by the time Godflesh broke up in 2002 I'd long since started thinking that singer/bandleader Justin K. Broadrick's side projects had become far more interesting, so color me stoked when he re-emerged with Jesu in 2003.
That band has gone through it's own fits and starts of experimentation, but "Homesick", the first single from upcoming album Every Day I Get Closer to the Light From Which I Came, is highly reminiscent in both tone and execution to 2006's EP headliner, "Silver", which makes it a bit of a homecoming, a return to form.
Remember how - back in the 80's - Enuff Z'Nuff always got lumped in with the hair metal crowd even though they might as well have been a dayglo Beatles cover band? That kind of incredulous marketing strategy surrounds Dallas band True Widow, who are signed to Relapse and - yes - have a slight doom sound about them, but effectively they're more of a shoegaze group with space rock tendencies than anything resembling metal proper.
Interesting mix of period styles here, Britpop-inflected shoegaze with a martial-lite, industrial percussive backing. Somewhere in the intersection where Jesus & Mary Chain, Cocteau Twins and Cabaret Voltaire were meant to collide - and never did - resides this.
Surf is the new shoegaze, and the unimaginatively monikered quartet Surfing have obviously been listening to their Washed Out and Best Coast in addition to their My Bloody Valentine. Can they squeeze one more hit out of the genre before the bubble bursts? Probably not, but "Hollow Sparrow" is a pretty glorious failure if nothing else.
Australia's always been a great country for vintage rock & roll sounds, so no surprise that Melbourne's own Beaches take to the whole surfgaze thing like a duck to water. She Beats is out May 3 on Chapter Music and will include an appearance by Neu!'s Michael Rother on two songs (!).
Nothing going on here except some serious vintage shoegaze. Don't know much about these guys aside from what's on their (mostly photo-centric) website but this interview from the cleverly titled Blog That Celebrates Itself shows the band's Domenic Palermo wearing his influences on his sleeve: Slowdive, Lush, Cocteau Twins, Swirlies... at least the guy isn't trying to pretend he invented all of this shit.
You can download the Downward Years to Come EP for a fiver via Bandcamp.
Dusted MBV worship is all the rage right now, but there is arguably no one that does Loveless-era shoegaze better in 2012 than SF-via-NZ chanteuse Tamaryn. Signed to (where else?) Mexican Summer since 2010, Tamaryn and semi-anonymous guitar player Rex Shelverton play it a smidge less obtuse than Kevin Shields and co. but their hearts are clearly in that 88-91 halcyon sweet spot.
Tender New Signs is already out. Yeah, WKMR is playing catch up... sue us.
Strawberry Switchblade had one album in 1985, bookended by a small handful of non-LP singles that stretched their oeuvre out from 1983-86. Dum Dum Girls have covered their final single, "Trees and Flowers", on their new End of Daze EP. The EP is largely a collection of material that was recorded for last year's Only in Dreams album but left off for not fitting in with the upbeat, girl group pop sound that the LP represented. The shoegaze/dream pop sound of the EP is definitely a right turn from the sound DDG have become known for, but considering how many bands are revisiting the dream/noise pop template in 2012 I wouldn't be surprised to see this become a permanent direction for the band.
This comes off like a less saturated My Bloody Valentine, which is a common enough touchstone in 2012 but represents a good look for this Philly quartet. "Pink Ruff" is the title track from their upcoming album which comes out in - damn! - January? For real?
And lest you think you were the first to draw the LeVar Burton references, yes, the band used to be called Reading Rainbow. Them ceast and desists are a motherfucker.
London's Weird Dreams walk an accessible line between dream pop and shoegaze, at least from the couple of singles we've heard from them so far: "Little Girls" and now "House of Secrets", a slow burn track that emphasizes easily made out vocals and chiming hooks. "House of Secrets" will be Weird Dreams' side of a split 7" with Girls Names, out June 25 on Slumberland.
(via Stereogum):
A lot of these 80's throwback groups could virtually pass for OMD or the Thompson Twins if they didn't slather on the production grime so thickly. Witness this tune by New Images signee LTD, which has a pop sensibility buried somewhere deep within that chillgaze facade.
The title "Der Microarc" may bring to mind steely Teutonic iciness - a rational tyranny of imperative emotionlessness - but that wouldn't be Violens' style. This is warm, nostalgic bliss of timeless melancholy, 60s AM haze and modern dream pop all wrapped into a concise, well executed package. Bonus points for recreating the famous "Subterranean Homesick Blues" cue card sequence using Rorschach-ian free associative imagery.
More syrupy, murky shoegaze from Brooklyn. Are we reaching the saturation point where this kind of somber, hazy tone starts to wear thin and backlash begins? Perhaps, but if that's the case this is one worth slipping in at the deadline. Last one, promise...
Ostensibly an element of the shoegaze genre at the dawn of their career, the Boo Radleys took several years and a number of albums before shedding the schizophrenia of their influences and settling into a focused yet diverse sound.
"Kaleidoscope" reveals the band struggling somewhat clumsily with the washed out psychedelia of shoegaze, furtive attempts at melody not entirely jibing with the sonic density required of the genre:
"Eleanor Everything" is a much better representation of the Britpop influences which would eventually dominate the band's repertoire, beginning with 1993's brashly titled Giant Steps:
The Telescopes first appeared on a split single with Loop in 1988, but within the next two years they'd dabbled in every corner of the neo-psych / dream pop / shoegaze triangle. This flitting from sound to sound, influence to influence may have harmed their chances of ever becoming mainstream, but it made for some pretty thrilling music at the time. Much of the early 'scopes material was mired down in muddy production and tossed off performances, but that all changed when the band were signed to Creation in early 1990. Emerging in December of that year, "Everso" marked their second single for the label, but it would be another two years before they released another full length album. That record, commonly known as Untitled or just The Telescopes, would be the group's last until a 2002 reunion.
For the most part, the objective here on WKMR is to cherry pick either the best or equally good but less well known tracks from a band's annual efforts in mixtape fashion... typically it's considered bad form and uncreative to stack a bunch of back-to-back songs from a band on a mixtape - even more so if they're from the same album or year - but in certain rare cases a band may be so prolific in a given era that they warrant a spotlight of their own.
Since we're trailing off on the first wave of shoegaze material from 1990, this seems an opportune time to inaugurate the Spotlight feature with the most prolific of those bands at the turn of the decade: Ride.
Like Swervedriver, Ride were from Oxford as well, sporting a neo-psych take on layered Britpop that differentiated them from the rest of their peers. They debuted in January 1990 with a self titled EP from which the following pair of songs is culled:
Both Ride and the subsequent Play EPs were repackaged for the US market as the Smile compilation. "Like a Daydream" is taken from the latter EP.
The following were present on all versions of Ride's debut long player, Nowhere. The 60's-style harmonies are noticeably offset by a decidedly post punk melodic sensibility.
And finally, these two were initially released on the Fall EP, which came out in September 1990, one month before the Nowhere album, and the entire Fall EP was appended to the CD release of the debut album. "Dreams Burn Down" in particular simultaneously looks back at the aching dream pop of Cocteau Twins while also anticipating the weighty ballast of 00s post-metal, as exemplified by Isis and many other bands on the Hydra Head roster.
Probably the band that brought the Dinosaur Jr influences to the forefront in the shoegaze scene, Swervedriver's debut EP at times even seems to anticipate the more commercial strains of grunge a couple of years later. "Son of Mustang Ford" certainly sounds more like a band from Boston or the Pacific Northwest than they do one from Oxford, England. But really if there was one thing shoegaze and grunge had in common, it was that both represented disparate groups of bands united only by geography and an exploratory enthusiasm for distortion pedals.
Emerging from the same Reading scene that produced Chapterhouse, Slowdive were their own animal, the songs more of a dense, atmospheric husk than the deconstructed pop song favored by many of their shoegaze counterparts. One can hear the influence on later post-metal bands like Isis and Jesu on songs such as "Avalyn 2". The Slowdive EP was the original demo that got the band signed to Creation - the "other" label that fought 4AD for dominance of the shoegaze scene during this period - and was more of a precursor to the slew of canonical studio recordings the band would begin churning out in 1991.
The Pale Saints were another shoegaze band signed to 4AD Records, home of Lush and the forefathers of the shoegaze movement, Cocteau Twins. The Saints' ethereal vocals were achieved less through layers of special effects and more through singer Ian Masters' wispy, paper thin croon. The band's Paisley Underground influences were reflected in a cover of Opal's "Fell From the Sun" off their 1990 debut long player, The Comforts of Madness. This song is the title track off an EP of non-album tracks released that same year.
Here's another one that initially appeared on an EP prior to making the track list for a later full length. Chapterhouse were a short lived yet influential shoegaze band out of Reading. Recording only two LPs and a clutch of singles and EPs, 1990 began a brief four year span of material before the band called it a day. Chapterhouse have reformed a few times in the last couple of years for festivals and brief tours, but there has been no word of a new studio album.
