Shoegaze

Record #980: Moodring – Stargazer (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / Leave a comment

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.

Continue reading →

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

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / Leave a comment

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?

Continue reading →

Record #977: Blanket – Ceremonia (2024)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

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.

Continue reading →

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

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

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.

Continue reading →

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

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

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.

Continue reading →

Record #979: Midwife – Luminol (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Moving now from one of heavy metal’s most celebrated champions to a hushed artist who calls her brand of music “Heaven metal” (but not in a Stryper way). Listening to Midwife’s output, it might seem like that tag is a joke. But while there isn’t anything obviously metallic (or even heavy) on Luminol, there are glints of sharpness glimmering in the muted, shoegazey atmospheres that betray a sensibility forged in the fires of heavy metal—and if you can’t tell by hearing, their place on the Flenser’s roster should fill you in.

Continue reading →

Record #968: Downward – The Brass Tax (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Looking back, the marriage of grunge and shoegaze should have been a little more obvious. At first blush, it might not seem like the unwashed, clenched teeth noise rock of the Seattle Sound would have much in common with the dreamy, mumbling walls of noise of the Scene that Celebrates Itself. After all, what kinship can Slowdive have with Soundgarden?

But if you look further from the center of each scene, you start running into bands like HUM, Failure, and Swervedriver—or even, I don’t know, The Smashing Pumpkins. The ’90s were filled with bands that found a middle ground between each scene’s love of huge guitars and hiding pop structures under noise and atmosphere.

Continue reading →

Record #967: Flying Saucer Attack – Flying Saucer Attack (1993)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Speaking of the intersection of ambient music and barely decipherable shoegaze, I realized recently that as often as they come up in conversations about shoegaze, drone, post rock, lo-fi, and other noisy scenes that tickle my brain in a nice way, I haven’t dug too deep into Flying Saucer Attack.

Of course, I’m familiar with them by reputation. I’ve even had a copy of Further for years. But my love for the project has not stretched out much beyond that one record. When I was reading about Belong for the last post though, there was an inordinate amount of comparisons to this, FSA’s self-titled record.

While Further is often lifted up as their most significant record, Flying Saucer Attack is much more song-based, implementing more substantial vocals and ubiquitous drum loops alongside the otherworldly ambient guitar experiments they’re remembered for.

Continue reading →

Record #966: Belong – Common Era (2011)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve picked up a worrying habit in the last couple years: I’ve been sleep-record-shopping. I will often wake up to order confirmation emails for records I don’t remember buying. I’m now pretty sure it’s a side effect of my new ADHD meds, but it hasn’t been enough of a problem for me to want to do something. It’s like a little gift from myself, and even my subconscious self is aware enough to keep to a certain budget.

Well, usually anyway. I got some money for Christmas that Sleepytime Nat has decided should be used to splurge, and he bought two pretty pricey records—that I’ve never listened to, mind you—in the last couple weeks that have raised my eyebrow.

The real problem is though…it’d be a lot harder to be mad at him if he didn’t have such great taste. One record was Loss, by the excellent British post-metal band Pijn, and the other was this: Common Era by Belong.

Belong was, by all metrics, an ambient drone band. They had released a number of largely formless texture experiments a lá Brian Eno that were well received. Then, after a three year absence, they released a shoegaze record, complete vocals and pulsing drum machines. However, the songs aren’t too much more coherent than their other work.

Continue reading →

Record #965: bdrmm – Bedroom (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Any sort of appeal to nostalgia has a fair amount of revisionism. The real life nuance that marked an era is too detailed for contemporary acolytes to keep track of, so they opt instead for broad strokes and general shapes. The shoegaze revival of the last several years is especially guilty of this, whittling down the (actually quite diverse) scene of the late ’80s and early 90s into a few landmark albums and a couple combinations of effects pedals.

But when you’re studying Loveless and Souvlaki for inspiration, you might miss that shoegaze was initially an offshoot of post punk and goth, using a vibrant color palette of pinks and violets to fill in the gloomy, monochromatic sparseness of their antecedents.

You can make solid shoegaze without diving too deep into that history. But when a band looks to the same influences as the shoegaze heroes of old, something special happens.

For instance, Bedroom by the British outfit bdrmm, which captures the dreamy landscapes of shoegaze while exercising a simplicity that feels more Joy Division than My Bloody Valentine.

Continue reading →