Two years before their 2019 album Nest ended up on just about every heavy music fan’s year-end list, Belgian power-trio released Burst, an album that blended hardcore, post rock, and shoegaze in just as satisfying proportions as their breakthrough hit.
The only real difference is that Burst had a smaller audience.
Before the double-album pop masterpiece that was Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming brought them widespread acclaim, M83 was an obscure, mostly instrumental act that blurred the line between shoegaze, post rock, and electronica.
On paper, the transition from experimental instrumental band to Billboard Charting Pop Group seems like it would yield albums that sound like completely different bands. However, the group’s sense of composition gives Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts the same sort of emotional storytelling and cinematic soundscapes that made Hurry Up such a huge hit.
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.
The phrase “style over substance” is often thrown out as a pejorative—especially in music critique. But to use that phrase as an insult misses just how much weight style can carry when done right.
Take, for instance, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, shoegazer-garage rock revivalists whose appeal is often distilled with a simple, “they’re just so freaking cool.”
That isn’t to say that there’s no substance here—there’s plenty. But these songs wouldn’t be nearly as irresistible if they weren’t marinated in the Cool factor and slow-roasted over a fire of leather jackets and Wayfarer jackets for a full twenty-four hours.
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.
As much as I love old-school shoegaze and new wave, I might enjoy it just as much when the punks lay down their aggressive downstrokes and power chords to reappropriate those sounds and moods in earnest.
Granted, neither Hopesfall nor Celebrity have exactly shied away from integrating these retro influences in their brands of post-hardcore. Even at their heaviest, they’ve retained a sense of tunefulness and melancholy that recall bands like New Order, My Bloody Valentine, and of course The Cure.
But when members of those projects join forces to delve more sincerely honor those influences, the result is magical.
Few members of the music scene are as prolific as Justin Broadrick. Since the first Jesu release in 2004, he has had more than twenty releases through that project, including a number of studio albums, EPs, splits, and collaborative albums.
Of those albums, I fell deeply in love with 2007’s Conqueror several years ago, but haven’t found anything else in his extensive catalogue that has captured me quite as tightly.
That is, until last year’s Terminus, which showcases his brand of sparkling bedroom doomgaze in an understated yet compelling way.
In the years since its release, I have often crossed paths with Deathconsciousness, the seminal debut record of goth/post-punk/shoegaze duo Have a Nice Life. At times, we’ve flirted. At others, I’ve tried to avoid eye contact. A few times, we sat down together and had a nearly incomprehensible conversation.
And yet, for all of its eldritch weirdness, there was something about this monolithic double album that has continued to call out to me. For a long time, the high prices of vinyl has kept me from exploring it any further, but when The Flenser announced another reissue (which came with a book!), I bought it almost out of impulse, unable to resist its alluring weirdness.
That impulse has paid off, as revisiting it again has proved it worthy of every ounce of its reputation.
Last summer, in the midst of global pandemic, some friends and I started a remote band called Bares His Teeth. As often happens when you write music together, we started sharing a lot of music with one another. We shared music that inspired us, songs that we wanted to emulate, and just songs we loved that bore no educational value to our own songwriting but we wanted to share anyway.
But towards the end of the year, the band chat became obsessed with one release in particular: the album Liminal by the small German outfit Entropy. It was hard to find, but that didn’t stop three-fifths of us from ordering it.
Even legends have to start somewhere. Through years of bouncing around the European black metal scene, Neige was dissatisfied with the ability of the kvlt to properly express what he had to say. Between other projects, he spent his time crafting otherworldly overtures that transcended the narrow confines of traditional black metal. In 2005, he released a pair of tracks under the name Alcest, a name he had used for another project as a teenager.
But Le Secret, that first EP, sounded nothing like the scorched-earth, burnt-church trad-black of his previous band. In fact, it didn’t sound much like anything else that had been released up to that point. The 2011 rerelease, reissued upon the success of the incredible Écailles de Lune, features rerecorded versions of each track with more resources to fulfill his original vision. But even in the face of the clearer versions, this EP demonstrates that Neige’s idea of what he meant Alcest to be has been unchanged from the beginning.