Record #1011: Belong – Realistic IX (2024)

It’s been thirteen years since Belong released their sparkling diamond Common Era. In that time, the shadow of that record grew out into the same edgeless infinity of its droning guitarscapes. That record melded the sounds of iconic records together like a dream you have while listening to a shoegaze and post punk playlist on shuffle. And in the midst of that dream, it Inceptioned itself into an iconic record itself.

It’s a tough record to follow, no matter the gap. But greater records have been followed up with longer gaps and have turned out fine. And while Common Era often felt like a sound study on Loveless, there’s a similar sort of parallel between m b v and Reminisce IX.

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Record #1009: Cold Gawd – I’ll Drown on This Earth (2024)

If it accomplished nothing else, God, Get Me the F*** Out of Here proved that shoegaze and hip hop aren’t entirely without overlap. Cold Gawd plugged their reverb pedals into their fuzz boxes and played with the spirit of hip hop. Only two years later, the SoCal outfit is back with a record that turns that concept up to eleven.

But I’ll Drown on This Earth borrows more than just aesthetic and mood. The vocals are often run through the same sort of autotune as Rihanna or T-Pain. Grooves are beefier and boomier. The skits are even more pronounced. And all this while also becoming more experimental and ambient.

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Record #1000: U2 – The Unforgettable Fire (1984)

After War its subsequent tour made them into The Next Big Thing, U2 pushed back. Per Bono’s own account, the world was waiting for the next The Who or Led Zeppelin, and it seemed that they were poised to fill ascend to that throne.

But they didn’t want to be “the Next” whoever or other. They wanted to be the first U2. And so they eschewed the throne waiting for them and took a hard left turn instead. They rented a castle and hired Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois to produce (a decision that Bono had to talk both the label and Eno himself into). Eno and Lanois took the sense of atmosphere that had always been a spice on their albums and turned it into a main course.

The resulting album was unlike anything before or since, forecasting shoegaze and post rock in prescient detail. And even in the light of thirty years, The Unforgettable Fire remains the most consequential album they’ve ever made.

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Record #982: Blushing – Sugarcoat (2024)

The last two times I’ve reviewed a Blushing record, I talked a lot about the tightrope that shoegaze acts have to walk between capturing the archetypal early 90s sounds of the genre and finding their own voice. By their third full length, Blushing walks this balance so deftly that mentioning it would be a moot point.

Sugarcoat offers up the same sweet, dreamy songcraft that the group has made their career on, but there’s a palpable confidence here. They’re even more fluent, and the vocabulary sounds more comfortable in their mouths.

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Record #980: Moodring – Stargazer (2022)

We all knew the nu-metal revival was inevitable. As soon as I started seeing Gen Z wearing wide-legged pants with fishnet tops, I knew it was dangerously close.

But I didn’t expect that it would come out of the shoegaze scene—or that I would be so into it.

Not that it got its hooks in me right away. When I first listened to this record—recommended to me after I got into Blanket—I got to the second or third track before turning it off. But after Loathe, vein.fm, and Fleshwater softened my initial resistance, I gave Stargazer another listen. And this time, it got me, and it got me good.

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Record #978: Fleshwater – We’re Not Here to be Loved (2022)

Over the years, an awful lot of digital ink has been spilled debating the question of whether or not Deftones are numetal. For a while, it seemed that the consensus was “No, they’re not numetal because they are good.” However, since Covid broke, it seems that there has been a group of young bands offering a rebuttal: “Yes, Deftones is numetal, and that is what makes them good.”

One of these acts is Fleshwater, featuring three members of metalcore outfit vein.fm, themselves no strangers to numetal adjacency (their newest record even has a turntablist). And while their walls of fuzzy guitars and laid back vocals have definite influences in shoegaze and space rock, their riffs are rife with both the heaviness and grooviness that dominated the JNCOs clad sounds of the turn of the millennium.

And, uh, it kinda rules?

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Record #977: Blanket – Ceremonia (2024)

Where do you go after love at first sight? The first time I listened to Blanket’s Modern Escapism, I was head over heels. I ordered a vinyl copy before I had even finished the second track, and I listened to it on repeat for weeks.

So when I saw news of the follow up, I rushed to preorder it. But after the first couple singles, I started to hesitate. They were poppier and more straightforward, with little remnant of the crushing heaviness that drew me in the first place. In fact, I even canceled my preorder at one point, only to re-preorder it at the next single.

And boy, am I glad I did. While it certainly has a directness and pop sensibility that contrasts with Modern Escapism, the record offers a holistic look at the wide expanse of 90s alt rock filtered through modern shoegaze.

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Record #975: Meltway – Nothing is Real (2024)

May be an image of record player and text that says 'meltway LP1 LP2'

I have no shortage of fellow music nerds sending me recommendations. But perhaps no one has the shooting average of my friend Richard. Richard and I met in a vinyl group on Facebook when I was trying to sell a Sigur Rós box set. He didn’t buy it, but he recommended me the band EF. Since then, we’ve exchanged recommendations back and forth, and he has hit far more than he has missed.

The most recent hit—and what a hit it was—was the most recent album from Danish/Norwegian shoegaze outfit Meltway, Nothing is Real, as dreamy and noisy as any record this side of the early nineties has gotten.

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Record #971: Morella’s Forest – Ultraphonic Hiss (1996)

As a music fan in the pre-streaming era, one of the best tools at your disposal was the back catalogs of your favorite record labels. And as a youth group kid in the early 2000s, I was naturally a huge acolyte of the Christian punk label Tooth & Nail Records.

As a fan of bands like Further Seems Forever, mewithoutYou, and Stavesacre though, there were some surprises waiting in their back catalog. The label was a surprising hotbed of shoegaze, lo-fi, and dreampop in the ’90s. Punk acts like MxPx and Ghoti Hook were labelmates with bands like Mike Knott, Starflyer 59, and Morella’s Forest. These last two bands would be my entry point into shoegaze, years before I had the language for it.

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