Gazin’ II!
Slowdive – When the Sun Hits
Part 2 of 3; Part 1 may be found here.
THESE POSTS ARE MEANT TO BE PLAYED LOUD.
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In Part II of our shoegaze tour, we’ll start with Slowdive – a band from the heyday of shoegaze that I felt didn’t always get the respect it deserved at the time* (they were second only to MBV in my personal pantheon), then take a trip down some shoegaze side streets.
Slowdive – Shine
Slowdive’s Neil Halstead has gone on to make dreamy, country-ish folk/rock.
In this performance, he dusts off some of his old Slowdive tunes, stripping them down to reveal the melodic melancholy underneath:
Neil Halstead – Alison etc. live
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Before Richard Ashcroft turned into a Britpop star, gave the Rolling Stones all his money, and made people reconsider whether Mick Jagger WAS in fact conventionally-handsome (if only by comparison), The Verve were considered part of the shoegaze scene (though instead of densely stacking their guitars, they favored a sort of Pink Floyd-ish trippy space-rock vibe).
Their debut LP, A Storm In Heaven, is a minor classic of the genre:
Verve – Slide Away
Verve – Beautiful Mind
Speaking of your classic rock, a bit of trivia: the lead singer of this next band is the cousin of Bruce Dickinson, of Iron Maiden fame.
It really tickles me the way he enunciates the chorus so delicately and clearly. I sing this at least once a month. Usually in traffic:
Catherine Wheel – Eat My Dust You Insensitive F**k
(Yes, yes, I know that particular Floyd-y/bluesy track isn’t very “shoegaze” – but it’s great, plus anyway their other videos are TERRIBLE, and don’t have an inexplicable homage to Depeche Mode, nor Summer Phoenix rolling around in the sand for some reason.)
Sticking with a automotive theme for a moment, Swervedriver were another weird fit in the shoegaze scene; they had guitar effects to spare, but they were less “dreamy” and more driving (GEDDIT?)
I think the sudden tempo shift at 3:00 remains thrilling (and sounds a lot like Dinosaur Jr. or Sonic Youth):
Swervedriver – Rave Down
They wrote hard rock songs about cars, and obviously remembered who the Stooges were:
Swervedriver – Son of Mustang Ford
Their best songs know when to ease off, and when to lay the pedal flat:
Swervedriver – Duel (edit)
They just SOUND like powerful, well-tuned motors, and sheer humming speed:
Swervedriver – Never Lose That Feeling
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Shoegaze can be gear-heavy. Some of the classics of the genre were recorded with many expensive guitars, pedals, and hours and hours of studio time and production/mixing work. (MBV’s Loveless took 2 years, 19 studios and purportedly nearly bankrupted their label, Creation Records, who dropped them due to the expenses; it took mega-sales from Oasis’ debut, to put Creation back in the black).
Just imagine the egg on all their faces when someone finally realized you can achieve some similar effects by overloading cheap 4-track home recording equipment.
These bands did MBV on a GBV budget:
Flying Saucer Attack – Soaring High
Astrobrite – Crasher
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Early Stereolab (from London) drew on shoegaze, mixed with krautrock, lounge music, French pop; basically anything that would sound good on the hi-fi in your space-age bachelor pad:
Stereolab – Peng! 33
I’ve featured an abridged studio/single version of this before, but here’s a longer take, live (hey, that’s the Spacemen 3 font!):
Stereolab – Jenny Ondioline (live)
Seely were from Atlanta, and were sort of an American Stereolab:
Seely – Meteor Shower
Embedding is unfortunately disabled on my favorite Seely song. About 4 minutes in, they lock into a trancey groove and ride it to Saturn.
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In Part I, I mentioned Hüsker Dü; their penchant for burying pop melody and introspection in ear-splitting volume and feedback was a key influence on the shoegaze scene.
When Bob Mould returned in 1992 with his new power trio Sugar, he drew in turn on the bands he’d influenced.
“BUT GLYPH!”, I hear you say, “you’re telling me Sugar, is shoegaze? Preposterous!”
Well, probably not quite shoegaze; Mould’s songs are generally more sharp and pointed, than soft and gauzy.
But the lyrics to “Gift” (“I received this gift from you…And now I give this gift to you”) seem like a clear admission that he is fully aware that it is basically a squalling MBV riff he’s playing here:
Sugar – Gift
In “Your Favorite Thing”, he actually blatantly nicks a lyric and a bit of the melody from MBV’s “Blown A Wish”:
Sugar – Your Favorite Thing
This is as vertigo-inducing as anything MBV ever did, even if it achieves the effect mostly through dizzying velocity:
Sugar – Tilted
This is the closing track from Sugar’s debut; a lullaby of a melody + mile-high guitars sure SOUNDS a lot like shoegaze, and check that shimmery, smeary artwork (that the band was signed in the UK to Creation Records, one of the key shoegaze labels, was certainly no coincidence):
Sugar – Man on the Moon
Part 3 next week! We’ll get to some more modern variants.
*Though it seems their star has risen in retrospect. They were the subject of a pretty decent Morr records cover/tribute compilation in 2002.
Image by Dhscommtech via Wikimedia Commons.
Catherine Wheel was my “HOLY CRAP, THEY SANG *THIS* SONG TOO???” band there for a while. I realized that I had spent the 90’s listening to them without ever having purchased an album of theirs… I’m sure I could name their songs and bring back at least two flashbacks for every single person around my age reading this comment…
Instead, I’ll just say that Phantom of the American Mother was one of the first songs that I absolutely positively had to share in the earliest days of Mindless Diversions and just hearing them now makes me hungry for the opening chords of “Mad Dog”.
Dang, that’s a good band.Report
I can’t listen to their cover of “Wish You Were Here” though.Report
I really, really like “Judy Staring at the Sun”, but there wasn’t a good video available – ah, screw it.
Though I will say – if your skin is Black Metallic, you should seek medical attention immediately, not write a song about it.Report
I really, really like “Judy Staring at the Sun”, but there wasn’t a good video available
The film got overexposed?Report
Swervedriver was really my introduction to shoegaze. Raise was certainly quite hard-rocking, but there was still a trippy/atmospheric undercurrent to it, and by the time they got to 99th Dream, the dream-pop was really coming out. Though they were very effects-reliant, they were still able to pull it off live (theirs was one of the best shows I’ve seen, which nearly resulted in me and my friend getting our asses kicked by bouncers).
It was with that friend that I later formed a shoegaze band (it wasn’t the intent, but it was the result). Sadly, that band didn’t last long enough. A little while after we ended, Adam Franklin and Bolts of Melody played the club where we regularly played and we had an in with the owner. I’m sure we could have gotten on that bill. Hell, we had a song titled Adam Franklin.Report
I’ve been kind of bingeing on Swervedriver since I wrote the post. I was always a Mezcal Head guy but there are some really good songs on Raise.
My copy of Ejector Seat Reservation, though, sounds crappy. I don’t know if that is due to the fact that it was some dodgy import (I’ve got a vinyl Loveless like that, it sounds awful) or if the album was really recorded that badly.Report
Ah, Hüsker Dü, The Verve, Stereolab, Catherine Wheel. I feel like I’m in college again. All that’s missing is this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQSUIRDs6VEReport
Oh man, I should not have listened to that song. I had a roommate who was a huge Red House Painters fan (huge), and not long after that album came out, and was therefore firmly planted in the CD player (for the kids: CDs were magical silver discs that, when struck by lasers, magically produced music and AOL). Right about that time, this girl who I really, really liked, much more (I now know) than she liked me, dumped me, and I spent a whole weekend listening to that song, drinking Jim Beam (it was Kentucky), and deciding that I was going to spend the rest of my life alone. Now it’s all come back to me!
Woeful is this human lot.
Woe! woe, etcetera . . . .Report
Don’t go blamin’ the shoegaze for The Mope. That’s the Red House Painters’ fault. You brought that on yourself.Report
Eleven minutes of saccharine mope (why doesn’t she love me?! whyyyyyyyyyyyyy?). Eleven… minutes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJU_qjdShgcReport
Speaking as someone who thinks that the Smiths’ live version of “I Know It’s Over” on Rank is almost 8 minutes of the most exquisite mope ever committed to record – Jeepers, that is depressing. At least Moz is funny too.
I don’t know if anybody but me would find this amusing, but I thought this was pretty hilarious:
http://thequietus.com/articles/14213-morrissey-novel-extractReport
Forgot to add…I think it took that semi-acoustic “Alison” above to make me realize how SAD that song is.
“Alison, I said we’re sinking
There’s nothing here but that’s OK..
Alison, I’m lost.”Report
“Forgot to add…I think it took that semi-acoustic “Alison” above to make me realize how SAD that song is.”
i think dagger is even worse. i don’t know if it’s about an abusive relationship, about a mutually destructive one, or just suicide.Report
Dangit, I don’t listen to shoegaze records for the lyrics!
Yeah, “Dagger” is rough. I assume a mutually-destructive relationship. That acoustic performance of it is pretty great.
Also, I actually prefer this remix of “Shine”, but this is a low-quality rip, seek out a better-quality copy if interested:
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My God, I love that song and the only version of it that I was able to find when I need to find a version of it was The Cars.
Until that point, I found myself hoping that there was a b side version out there, somewhere, that used the real lyrics. The version they couldn’t play on the radio.
Ah, the 90’s.Report
flying saucer attack is the bizness. i got to them via the third eye foundation, whose album “ghost” is basically the junglist massif drowning. (also one of the best albums of the 90s)Report
I actually haven’t listened to a ton of Third Eye Foundation, despite having a few remixes (and, really liking that cryptic name).
Speaking of cryptic, I always liked the little messages and slogans on FSA releases (“Less is more”; “Rural Psychedelia”; “This marks the end of FSA Phase One”; “Phase Two”; etc.)Report
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUhnPo7ijBw
also the bizness. the 14 minute version on that 12″ is the ultra bizness.
fsa has some great stuff – their last album (distance) has some nearly swans-y moments.Report
(hates self for nitpicking)
(does it anyway)
Do you mean Mirror? Distance was an early singles comp.
An entirely different FSA:
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yeah mirror. zoinks!Report
Oh man, I just went back and listened to all the songs in the first post (I was computerless in Tennessee when you posted it), and what’s weird is how much shoegaze I listened to without ever really thinking of it as shoegaze. Or really knowing that such a thing existed back then. Apparently I am a shoegaze fan, sort of like Kyuss makes me a stoner doom metal fan without even knowing it.Report
Gabba Gabba Hey, One of Us…
What’s funny, was I thought for many years it was sort of a niche interest…Lord knows I chased down anything kind of related to shoegaze, but then again I do, when I find something I like.
But when I sat down to write these posts, I realized how thoroughly the style has permeated subsequent guitar and electronic music. I mean, Billy Corgan has pretty explicitly said he was inspired by Loveless when he made Siamese Dream (and you can hear that, IMO), and that thing sold like four kabillion copies. Next week’s post is more modernish shoegaze descendants, and I had to leave a bunch of artists out…if shoegaze is a niche, it’s a pretty huge one in pop music now.Report
Where that Ramones song came from; what a strange movie it is, too (it’s not surprising that the Ramones dug it):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C4uTEEOJlMReport
I’ve been thinking along those same lines this week. People like M.I.A. and Camera Obscura that no sane person would *call* shoegaze… and yet, you can tell they’ve listened to it. A LOT.Report
Well, now I’m going to spend my day listening to M.I.A. and trying to figure out who else I listen to who is either shoegaze or shoegaze-inspired.Report
I’m glad you got to Swervedriver. Raise is a great, dark, and above all disciplined record. No guitar solos, no harmonized choruses. “Harry and Maggie” on Mezcal Head shows what you can do when you’ve got a majestic riff and you’re not afraid to use it. That band was just snakebit, if I member creckly. Didn’t their first US tour end when their drummer abruptly got off the bus and flew back to England?Report
I don’t know about the drummer thing, but I know Ejector Seat Reservation wasn’t even released here, then Creation dropped them right after it came out in the UK:
http://www.allmusic.com/album/ejector-seat-reservation-mw0000460253
Like I said, my copy has crappy sound, but there are some really good songs on it:
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The other thing about Swervedriver….GREAT driving music. I drove across the country and back one time before I had an MP3 player, so I had to bring the big CD folder, and I made sure to include Mezcal Head, because I had always wanted to blast “Duel” while driving through the desert at excessive, illegal, and frankly, LUDICROUS speed.
It was exactly as awesome as I’d hoped.Report
There was a period of time in undergrad when I fell asleep each night to Mezcalhead. I love that album.Report
@boegiboe – I can see that. I may have mentioned that my brother once found me asleep on the floor of my room with Psychocandy still blasting. That thick fuzzy noise can be very soothing.
Plus, on the final track of (the US version of) Mezcal Head, “Never Lose That Feeling” segues directly into the terrific space-rock of “Never Learn”, with the jazz horns and everything:
Yeah, that would be a great way to drift off…Report
My only chance to see the re-formed Swervedriver was when my band played a festival with them a few years ago. (I guess it was more of a conference, so “we played with them” is a sneaky way to put it.) They were supposed to start a few blocks away from where we had just finished our set, but a giant cloudburst opened up right as we got our gear offstage. Never got there.Report
I never got to see Swervedriver. 🙁
In fact, I haven’t seen most of the bands in these first couple posts: I’ve seen the JAMC, Lush, Stereolab and MBV, and that’s about it.
Never saw Galaxie (saw Luna, and Dean solo). Never saw S3 (but I’ve seen Spiritualized). Never saw Hüsker Dü or Sugar (but I’ve seen Bob Mould solo).Report
The tour (for Raise) didn’t end, but the drummer (Graham Bonnar) left the tour bus while they were waiting at the Canadian border to “go get a sandwich” and never came back. I’ve had friends that would quit jobs the same way, like, “Uh….I need to go get something out of my car”. Passibe aggressively awesome.
They weren’t really the same band after Bonnar left, he was a great rock drummer.
The thing about Raise was that it was sort of a best hits collection of their early EPs but it still seemed to have a coherent theme and flow.Report
I always credited that coherence to Alan Moulder’s production, though now I can’t swear that he was the producer.Report