When Kyle Bates holed himself up in his Pacific Northwest apartment to record an album about isolation, grief, and personal trauma, he had no way of knowing how universal those feelings would become by its release. On the other side of lockdowns, protests, and relationships frayed by the above, Bates’ examinations are endlessly relatable—however, they still sound deeply personal, almost as if he never intended to release it.
Shoegaze
Record #938: Anchors – Adult Decisions (2019)
Go to local shows.
I cannot emphasize this point enough. Beneath the glimmer of mainstream music is a thriving ecosystem of artists who are just as good (or better!) than anything you might find on on the radio. And while some folks might scoff and say, “but I don’t know any of those bands!”, the discovery is the point.
A few weeks ago, my band played a show in a city we’d never been, and we were delighted by both the reception we received and the quality of the bands we played with. For the point of this post, I’ll draw special attention to Anchors, playing that night as a solo act on electric guitar. I got a copy of the album and found that while the stripped-down arrangements helped to highlight David Black’s clever songwriting, the full band versions on record don’t obscure it any.
Record #923: Blanket – Modern Escapism (2021)
Kids today don’t appreciate how good they’ve got it. Back in my day (groans), it would take hours to download a single song, so you would have to carefully weigh what you were interested in hearing so you could make the most of your download time. If you just discovered a new emo band, you would typically spend your precious time downloading other emo bands, only rarely straying beyond that.
Now, thanks to streaming platforms and high speed internet speeds, you can jump from Sunny Day Real Estate to My Bloody Valentine to Slayer to Body Count to 100 Gecs instantly. The floodgates are open.
One of the most interesting byproducts of this unfettered access to the whole of recorded music is the widespread cross-pollination of scenes and genres. I’ve been around long enough to see how shoegaze, metal, and hardcore have interbred to create heavier shoegaze (or gazier metal?).
I listen to a lot of that sort of stuff, so it takes a bit for me to be impressed anymore. And “impressed” is a weak word for my reaction to Blanket, whose second LP Modern Escapism recently grabbed me by the lapels and demanded my attention.
Record #911: Fotoform – Horizons (2021)
As a music reviewer, my inbox is constantly bombarded with press packs. The unfortunate truth is that most of this goes ignored, buried amid the insurmountable pile of album streams and press releases.
But every once in a while, something will leap from the murky stream of promos and glisten like an iridescent marlin in the sun, catching my attention and holding it. A couple years ago, one of those records was Horizons, the sophomore record of Seattle’s Fotoform, a shining bit of post-punky shoegaze that’s as emotionally stirring as it is urgent.
Record #906: The Cure – Bloodflowers (2000)
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.
Record #903: The Cure – Wish (1992)
When I first heard Disintegration, which I bought on reputation alone, I lamented that I didn’t get into the Cure when I was a teenager. My thirties were too late to start a Cure phase—too late for the gloomy goth rockers to sink their hooks into my soul as deeply as they were meant to be (I even blamed my very 80s child mother for not exposing me to them).
Then, I had a child, and at six months old, she is certainly not too young for a Cure phase. As we’ve tried different strategies to get her to sleep, we’ve discovered that the most reliable tool is the Rockabye Baby series’ collection of Cure lullabies. And as those delightfully sweet arrangements have played on repeat in our house the last few weeks, I’ve found myself obsessing over the Cure with the same earnestness I thought I had missed out on by getting into them later.
That new obsession has gotten me to finally check out Wish, which I had assumed for years was an unabashed pop backlash to the dirge of Disintegration, based solely on the sugary hit “Friday I’m In Love.”
Boy, was I wrong.
Record #897: Cold Gawd – God Get Me the Fuck Out of Here (2022)
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.
Record #896: Another Heaven – III: The Sorrowful Cries of Birds with Singed Feathers (2021)
The internet has come a long way since I would spend hours scouring forums and record label sites for new bands, frantically downloading songs at the speed of dial-up, and hoping that at the end of the three-hour download, it wouldn’t be that stupid Bill Clinton impression. But if we’re being honest, having instant access to nearly every song ever recorded has brought its own problems.
That’s why it’s so helpful when a new band just plops their music right in front of you.
That’s what happened with Another Heaven (formerly post-punk outfit Hollow Boys) who dropped a track onto the r/shoegaze subreddit a couple years ago with a promise that they were working on an album. I saved the post, but forgot about it until a few weeks ago. And when I went looking for said album, I found three. The most recent (and fully formed) of these was this—a collection of heavy, sludgy shoegaze songs about the apocalypse. You know, the exact stuff I’m into.
Record #890: Esben and the Witch – Wash the Sins Not Only the Face (2013)
At this point, I should just ignore my Spotify Daily Mixes. They’re becoming financially ruinous. Almost every time I skim through one, I find something that immediately grabs my attention (see also: Life on Venus, Grivo, Locrian…).
A few weeks ago, I was looking through one of these playlists and was fascinated by the delay-heavy guitar and ethereal alto vocals of “Slow Wave,” so I dug further. What I found was an album that felt like Warpaint had been listening to a lot more goth, post rock, and black metal. Which hit my sensibilities right on the button—which in turn saw me pressing the “order now” button on a copy on Discogs.
Record #888: Blankenberge – Everything (2021)
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.