dream pop

Record #906: The Cure – Bloodflowers (2000)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

Let me start by explaining that my recent Cure obsession isn’t totally aimless: my podcast cohost and I decided to take an episode to do a deep dive through the legendary Goths’ discography—a daunting task for anyone, but especially for someone who had largely ignored their legacy for most of their life (namely, me).

While I’d already spent a decent amount of time with some of their most celebrated releases, I set off to familiarize myself with everything I was unfamiliar with. I’ve spent the last couple weeks binging their albums, reading Wikipedia and album reviews like I was cramming for college finals, and filling in the gaps in my Cure collection.

One thing that I learned during this time is that usually, the general consensus about each Cure album is mostly trustworthy. If an album is good, everyone says it’s good. If it’s bad, everyone says it’s bad.

But there is one blindingly glaring exception to that rule: 2000s Bloodflowers, a brilliant and understated record that is almost universally maligned. And while I’ll admit that its artwork does it no favors, this is one case where the collective music historian consciousness is very mistaken.

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Record #897: Cold Gawd – God Get Me the Fuck Out of Here (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

For all of its neon atmospheres and purple-hued aesthetics, shoegaze is a little monochromatic when it comes to skin tone. The demographics of both shoegaze fans and musicians typically skew a bit more caucasian than their relative populations.

This isn’t a unique phenomenon in alternative, punk, or metal genres, and I’m not here to dissect the myriad of social issues that created it. But to my knowledge, there haven’t been too many notable exceptions in shoegaze (please correct me if I’m ignorant).

But then there’s Cold Gawd. Originally formed as a solo project of lead singer Matt Wainwright, their brand of shoegaze is as equally indebted to genre mainstays like Nothing and Slowdive as R&B artists like Solange and 90s hip hop aesthetics.

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Record #888: Blankenberge – Everything (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

Everyone talks about how the internet has made the world smaller, but less attention has been given to how it has expanded microcosms into galaxies. Microgenres have become scenes unto themselves, with legions of bands offering sonic homage to a handful of albums.

Where the term “shoegaze” originally referred to a dozen or so bands around London, the sonic explorations they pioneered have created hosts of acolytes making their own pilgrimages through reverb-and-fuzz-drenched guitars. This scene has further bifurcated itself, with further microscenes forming within the context of an already niche genre (see: dreamgaze, heavy shoegaze, blackgaze, doomgaze, dreamo and more).

One of the more fascinating microscenes I’ve discovered is the Russian shoegaze scene, which is comprised of bands like Life on Venus, Pinkshinyultrablast, and Blankenberge, whose album Everything is quickly becoming a favorite of mine.

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Record #841: Life on Venus – Odes to the Void (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Every once in a while, I get a desire for new music that can almost be called bloodlust. A few weeks ago, that spell came over me, and I took to the hunt. I scoured Spotify, Bandcamp, review sites, Amazon recommendations, and more trying to find something that would slake my thirst.

There, in the “Fans also listen to” section of Holy Fawn’s Spotify page, I found Life on Venus, a Moscovian shoegaze/dream pop quintet. After finding both their Bandcamp and Discogs out of stock, I spent a few hours searching the internet trying to secure a copy. I finally found one on Amazon.de, gladly paid the extra for shipping, and waited impatiently.

And now that my prey is secured, it’s time to play it far too many times.

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Record #833: Boris – W (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few bands are as prolific as Boris. The Japanese trio has done everything from shoegaze to synthpop to drone to thrash metal to harsh noise to garage rock to punk to hardcore to post rock to rockabilly (probably—I’m not actually sure if they’ve done any rockabilly, but probably). The sheer mass and diversity of their output makes for some great moments, but it makes it very difficult to call any of their albums essential. 

Sure, there are some legendary mile markers in their discography: most people point to Pink, I point to Noise. But for the most part, while their consistently enjoyable and impressive as a whole, most of the individual albums aren’t very distinctive from one another.

To that point, W is their twenty-seventh album—a number that doesn’t include their seemingly endless list of collaborative works. However, W feels unique enough even among Boris’s discography that it warranted adding it to my collection.

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Record #825: Deafcult – Auras (2017)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Throughout the history of shoegaze, bands have tried hundreds of different techniques to create the huge blissful walls of sound the genre calls for. Of course there’s gliding, the method developed by Kevin Shields and aped by ever other shoegaze guitarist ever (guilty), but bands have also tried everything from walls of amps to layering dozens of takes of the guitar parts to more guitar pedals than one person should be able to understand.

Brisbane Australia’s Deafcult employ a novel method that’s genius in its simplicity: they just have four guitarists.

It’s an elegant, if obvious, solution and the results speak for themselves on the hazy, crushing atmospheres on Auras. 

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Record #782: Lush – Spooky (1992)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

For all the affection that early 90s shoegaze gets across the blogosphere, most of that attention is given to a very small number of bands. Namely, this attention is given to My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive (I’ve recently noticed that Ride, the third member of the longstanding Shoegaze Trinity, has been ignored or maligned by modern listeners).

And while these two powerhouses may be the most indelible members of the Scene that Celebrates Itself, there’s a lot of gold to glean in the history of the genre. Loveless aside, there are plenty of bands who offered the lush atmospheres and, otherworldly, dare I say spooky, melodies that are synonymous with shoegaze.

Take for instance, London fourpiece Lush and their debut album Spooky, which is both of those things.

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Record #780: Low – C’Mon (2011)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

On paper, slowcore giants Low don’t seem like the most obvious candidates for an Americana album. This is especially true for those of us who came to the band through the glitchy, atmospheric noise project Double Negative and worked their way backwards through their sparse soundscapes.

And while this album and Double Negative are as dissimilar to one another as anything else in the Low catalog, C’Mon delivers the same sort of minimalist compositions, just augmented by lap steels, fiddles, banjos instead of effects pedals and synthesizers.

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Record #771: Kellen – Lowercase God (2018)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

One of the things about having friends that run record labels is that sometimes, you’ll get curated bonuses thrown in with your orders. This is especially true of my friend Rob who runs Friend Club Records, who always includes trading cards of hockey players and handwritten notes with the cassettes I buy from him.

But sometimes, he’ll toss a record my way, which is how I was introduced to Kellen and their brilliant genre-bending EP Lowercase God.

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Record #736: Chapterhouse – Whirlpool (1991)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Speaking of nostalgic shoegaze…

Most of the conversations about the history of shoegaze are focused around three bands in particular: Ride, Slowdive, and My Bloody Valentine. This trinity embodies much of the spirit of shoegaze that modern revivalists try to channel with their own work.

But there are hosts of lesser celebrated bands from the same era who, despite lacking the same footprint, are still entirely worthwhile. Case in point: Chapterhouse. Continue reading →