For The Love Of Shoegaze
Shoegaze Fetish Series
Credit for the title of this post goes to Frank over at the wonderful blog Chromewaves (aptly named after a shoegaze track). During email exchanges in the creation of this post, he used those words for the title of his email. And a title that is on the money, verified by reading the excellent contributions from the music blogging community. My thanks to everyone below for taking the time to contribute to this post and thanks to all of you who are taking the time to enjoy this love of Shoegaze.
There are many descriptions these days for the music genre called Shoegaze. As the story goes "The name was coined by the New Musical Express, noting the tendency of the bands' guitarists to stare at their feet (or their effects pedals), seemingly deep in concentration, while playing. Some fans will argue another story, that shoegazing music was originally made with the intention of being listened to while taking heroin,[citation needed] and that the name refers to a passage from the book Naked Lunch. Melody Maker preferred the more staid term The Scene That Celebrates Itself, referring to the habit which the bands had of attending gigs of other shoegazing bands, often in Camden. The key record labels associated with the genre were Creation Records (My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive) and 4AD". Read the rest of the Wiki story here.
A more common attribute of Shoegaze is a sound full of winding, interweaving distorted guitars (usually two) creating a unique droning sound (distortion is good when done right). Shoegaze vocals by definition are usually 'subdued' gently hovering over the drone. There is melody intact but at times requires a thorough listen to follow its purpose.
For me Shoegaze is an introspective dreamy music, a background soundscape to life. There is a certain calming effect I achieve when listening to Shoegaze - droning guitars are my friend. The element of female vocals in early Shoegaze is an attribute that I really love - ref. Lush, MBV etc.. To select my favorite all time Shoegaze track is not an easy task, in fact it may just be impossible. So, to stay true to form, I have picked a track that I feel is most representative of the genre Shoegaze in all its purity. "Treasure" from Chapterhouse is such a track. Beautiful waves of distorted droning guitars glide and move all the way through this track, the vocals dancing on the top of the drone carrying it into a tremendous wall of shoegaze sound - "Treasure" - "I'm In Heaven".
Chapterhouse - "Treasure"
From Whirlpool
mp3 Treasure
Frank - Chromewaves
Slowdive - "Dagger"
From Souvlaki
One of my favourite shoegaze songs isn’t really a shoegaze song at all.“Dagger”, the final track on Souvlaki, is remarkable on many levels. It not only closes Slowdive’s second and best album but essentially closes the book on shoegazing for the band completely. Considering that they were one of the biggest bands (though still highly underrated) bands of the genre, this was no small thing.
On its own, the song is amazing as a stark and beautiful meditation on love and loss, mainly featuring Neil Halstead and his acoustic guitar with light, barely-there piano in the distance, a low, deliberate bassline and a ghostly backing choir over the chorus. Both sonically and lyrically it’s a world apart from everything they’d done before, with a tone distinctly barer and darker than the slow-motion daydreams of Just For A Day. There’s a hesitance and fearfulness between the lines, maybe even a threat of violence, and after the previous nine songs of the album, it sounds like someone stepping out of a fantasy world and into the sober grayness of reality – apprehensive but made resolute by love and devotion.
In the bigger picture, “Dagger” acted as a coda for Slowdive as a shoegazer band. Over the course of just two records, the band had grown from a barely post-teens group who’d lightly conned their way into a record deal and were happily lost in sound to ahead-of-their-time sonic visionaries overly constrained by the expectations of the scene they had helped define. Halstead, in particular, demonstrated amazing growth as a songwriter in that span – it’s no accident that “Dagger” is the best song in Slowdive’s ouvre and yet sounds nothing like anything they’d done before. While their final album, Pygmalion, would become hailed as a landmark in ambient/electronica, it was the gothic country of “Dagger”that best represented Halstead’s new muse, foreshadowing the band’s future incarnation as Mojave 3 and proving there is life after reverse reverb.
mp3 Dagger
David - Largehearted Boy
Ride - "Seagull"
From Nowhere
I associate the shoegaze genre with Ride's Nowhere album. I remember the first time I listened to this record, "Seagull" grabbed me from its beginning, all high hats and guitar reverb, and I fell in love with the album and the band immediately. Other Ride songs may be better, but like a first kiss, the rollercoaster that is "Seagull" holds a special place in my heart.
mp3 Seagull
Bethanne - Clever Titles
Slowdive - "When The Sun Hits"
From Souvlaki
Three years ago, I discovered Slowdive via a CD a friend of mine recieved in the mail from a mutual friend. The note included said that it was an album to listen to when making love and if you weren't at the time you were listening to the album, you would be. Nevertheless, we played the album one night when I happened to be visiting and though no one made love to that record, we drank our hearts out to this wonderful band. I then realized that their album - Soluvaki - is a beautiful album. Full of lush guitars and mellow rhythms, Soluvaki is an album that I wouldn't mind putting on the stereo to enjoy with a lover or with others to drink and discuss life. This particular song - "When The Sun Hits" - is a glorious song full of beaming vocals and gorgeous distortion. It's one of my favorite shoegaze songs to put on when I am in the mood for a bit of sadness with a bit of happiness.
mp3 When The Sun Hits
Stytzer - Hits In The Car
Malory - "Just Be"
From Not Here Not Now
I think I’ll have to agree with Merz. We all have some shoegazer in us, but as strange as it may seem, I didn’t know that until less than a year ago. Strange, because I’m 37 years old and have been a music freak for as long as I can remember, but somehow this magnificent kind of music eluded me for years. So today I’m doing my best to make up for the lost time and have managed to make myself a little bit familiar with the genre.
I expected that picking just one song would turn out to be quite a (painful?) challenge, but it took less than a minute for me to make up my mind. I didn’t pick this song, because it’s the best one. Nor is it a well-known classic. I simply chose it, because it was one of the songs (if not THE one) that ignited my interest in shoegaze. The song is Just Be by German shoegaze/dream-pop band Malory and the first time I listened to it I instantly knew that there was something out there I simply had to check out. The track is more dream-pop than actual shoegaze, but it’s utterly beautiful and should appeal to anyone, with even the smallest shoegazer hidden inside.
mp3 Just Be
Colin - Let's Kiss And Make Up...
Kitchens Of Distinction - "Margaret's Injection"
From Best Of KOD (1988-1994)
“One of the tracks from the Elephantine EP. Our only bluntly political song in that it calls for the slow painful death of Margaret Thatcher, withdrawing blood from her drop by drop until she is no more. Grizzly fantasy! Fond of the cyclical guitar/bass thing at the end.”
Patrick Fitzgerald, KoD.
www.stephen.hero.co.uk
“She'll never be forgotten she made sure of that,
Selling back to people what they'd already got.”
Quite simply, there was no one quite like the Kitchens of Distinction. I don’t think there ever will be. No one seemed able or willing to get their guitars to make sounds like they did – the only nearly comparable sound being what Reg and Dave were coming up with for The Chameleons and, later on, The Reegs. During their relatively short life, the Kitchens maintained a quality over quantity approach to their craft and how they actually came up with some of these guitar noises I just can’t fathom. They are a band sorely missed. They came from Ireland. Patrick was openly gay and proud – something rare in indieland during their time.
I was saving this track for an extended post on Let’s Kiss and Make Up entitled ‘Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!’ (a best of political 80s indie, if you will) but rather than never getting around to that I thought the song would be best offered and shared to this collective shindig as hosted by Merz. Patrick explains in his comments above what the song is all about – the slow and hopefully painful death of Margaret Thatcher – an infamous British Prime Minister that effectively reduced British society during the 1980s to one big corporate shopping mall whereby any notion of community, society, collective action and social responsibility was rendered impotent and considered to be, just like the miner’s during their industrial action, ‘the enemy within’. Many people of my generation will never forgive her, or her party, for what they did to the country – violence is rarely the answer but Patrick accurately sums up the anger and resentment that many on the political left (and in the centre) felt about this shameful period in our history. It would have been so much better if she’d just had that injection…
And Patrick is right, the looping/cyclical guitar and bass ‘thing’ at the end of this song is just about as perfect as perfect gets. This alone ensures its status as one of the best things they came up with – even if your politics dictates that you can’t agree with the lyrics and intent.
Details: The track can either be found on the ‘Elephantine EP’ (you are best trying Ebay or similar for this) or on the ‘bonus’ CD that’s part of ‘Capsule’ - a ‘best of’ KoD that be bought in most record shops and online via Amazon or similar). You might already know this but Patrick is still recording under the moniker Stephen Hero. You should really check his excellent solo material out if you haven’t done so yet. RIP KoD – we miss you.
mp3 Margaret's Injection
Kevin - So Much Silence
Hum - "Green To Me"
From Downward Is Heavenward
As I'm writing this, I have no idea how my definition of shoegaze will differ from others, which makes the collaboration curiously appealing. The term, and its originators, probably predate my discovery it, so I'm hoping to learn something here. My introduction to the shoegaze sound came by way of the great Catherine Wheel: huge, swirling guitars underpinned by attractive melodies.
But picking a CW song would have just been too easy. So I'm deferring to Hum, the greatest thing to come out of Champaign, Ill., since Kendall Gill. Hum is best known for the hit Stars, and deservedly so. It was a great song -- all full of crunchy guitars and hooks. For what it's worth, it captured Hum's spacious sound and recurring themes of all things astrological.
Alas, the hubbub over the song wore off, and Hum's swan song LP, Downward is Heavenward (1997), was grossly overlooked. It took Hum probably a little deeper into outer space -- topically and musically. Sorry, but they were scientists before We Are Scientists.
My pick, Green to Me, is arguably even poppier than Stars, if not just as cryptic lyrically: "She lifts her wings up high, sensors show a lifetime until we die. / And all the dreams' details perfected in the colored sky." I'm sure there's some metaphor hidden there for love and loss that I'm too dense to figure out. Still, I love how this track somehow balances feedback-heavy guitars with a defined, clear melody. There's a bit of distant feel with the distortion, but still something to hold onto.
mp3 Green To Me
Jeff - DIY Rockstar
Bethany Curve - "Sleep"
From Flaxen
When I put my name down to contribute to this Shoegaze project, I had little to no Shoegaze experience or expertise. By that I mean I knew what it was all about and was familiar with some of the major players, but I hadn’t ever sat down and listened to it, or paid that much attention to the whole scene. So, to learn more on this subject, I went to the two places a person can find any knowledge known to mankind: Wikipedia and Google. The Wikipedia article presented only very basic tidbits about it, but a Google search presented me with a very obvious option: Shoegaze.com. It seemed like a good start, so I clicked. It turned out to be the website for Shoegaze band Bethany Curve. I went to the Mp3 section and had a listen.
My favorite song was by far "Sleep". In true Shoegaze fashion, it is full of swirling guitars and relies heavily on a dreamy atmosphere. Listening to it reminds me of walking through a dense fog, where you are moving forward, but can never quite get your bearings. It is a short tune, but is interesting, melancholy, and deserves multiple listens. "Sleep" may have been the second or third Shoegaze track I have ever really listened to, but it was very impressive and inspired more investigation into a new genre.
mp3 Sleep
Eric - Knobtweakers
Transient - "Quicksand"
From Hammerpants
Transient produces mellow IDM, and has releases on a number of netlabels. You can download them all for free. On his most recent album, "Hammerpants", there is one song that gets me gazing at my toes every time I hear it (I generally don't wear shoes in the house).It's more ambient electronic than rock, the melancholy tone and pretty melody never fail to tug at my heart strings and appeal to the depressed teenager still clinging to my distant memories.
mp3 Quicksand
Avi - It's A Trap
Silverbullit (Citizen Bird) - "Only Gold"
From Arclight
Many of the classic shoegaze bands associate with the twee/C86 scene don't really appeal to me, I'm far more partial to the damaged sounds and ringing feedback of early Jesus and Mary Chain. I don't just want pretty, shimmering waves of guitar, I long for thick, solid walls of noise. Sweden's Silverbullit (known abroad as Citizen Bird) understands and meets my needs. Held back for over year due to label turmoil, 2004's "Arclight" is a monument to modern/post-millennium shoegazing. The band is far less content staring at the ground than stirring up a ruckus. The guitar tones on this particular track owe an obvious debt to My Bloody Valentine's "Glider", but the propulsive rhythm section carries the band further off into the stratosphere. Silverbullit doesn't get nearly as heavy as, say, Jesu (my runner-up selection for this posting), but they don't need to because maniacal frontman Simon Ohlsson elevates them to the next level without falling back on a fuller low-end. Unfortunately, album recordings can only do much as the best way to experience this kind of music is always live, with the volume turned up loud enough that you feel the sound moving the air. I don't have high hopes they'll ever come back to the US (they opened for The Soundtrack of Our Lives on a stint many years ago), but the temptation to fly halfway around the world to see them again is high.
mp3 Only Gold
Kevin - mp3hugger
The Drop Nineteens - "Winona"
From Delaware
While the Lions share of the Shoegaze fraternity was made up of English bands there were some notable exceptions. The Drop Nineteens came from Boston and played it very cleverly by letting the UK based ‘Hut’ label (already home to Verve) spread the word about them. The move didn’t result in many sales but ‘Winona’ broke into the ever-credible Peel’s Festive Fifty at Number 28 in 1992. ‘Winona’ was written about Ms Ryder the actress, a dainty little thing who pre-cctv was a much admired poster girl for many an indie boy. ‘Winona’ revels in its churning guitars and Greg Ackell’s slightly distorted vocals. Like My Bloody Valentine circa ‘Loveless’ the blustering noise never loses sight of the important thing that makes all good music memorable. The grasp on melody is supreme, beneath the twisted instruments and powerful percussion sits a beehive ripe with melody.
mp3 Winona
Darren - grapeJuiceplus
Blur - "I Know"
From Leisure
Shoegaze has always seemed like one of the smallest of genres...everyone knows the sound is defined by My Bloody Valentine and Ride, but the other bands...? They aren't always the easiest to identify. Personally, it's always been easier for me to identify the bands that were/are influenced by the sound. And although they may not be the band that first pops into your head, the first album by Blur wore their shoegazing tendencies on their sleeve....
mp3 I Know
<< Home