space rock

Record #980: Moodring – Stargazer (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

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 #970: Hopesfall – The Satellite Years (2002)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Let me offer up a disclaimer: there are tons of people for whom this is a foundational record. I am not one of them. My introduction to Hopesfall was 2018’s Arbiter, but their back catalogue was rife with prohibitively high vinyl prices (my Achilles’ heel). When I saw them at Furnace Fest in 2021 though, it made me a believer. It might have taken a bit for me to pull the trigger on this (pricey) reissue, but I’m glad I did.

Where much of the Christian-adjacent early 2000’s metalcore has not aged very well, The Satellite Years might actually look better in the light of hindsight, thanks to a generous amount of HUM style space rock punctuating their riffs and breakdowns (and yeah, Matt Talbot even produced it).

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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.

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Record #953: Lift to Experience – The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads (2001)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

It seems no matter how deep I dig (and boy, do I dig deep sometimes), there’s always some seminal release I’ve missed—even in the exact scenes I’ve been trudging through. Take for example Lift to Experience, whom I had never heard of before a review referred to my own band as “We have Lift to Experience at home” (a favorable comparison, I hope).

I’m constantly fascinated by the points of reference other people have when they hear us, so I checked out this band that we were purportedly ripping off. Truth be told, it seems like the only immediate comparison is our shared devotion to overdriven guitars and reverb pedals. But when I divorced them from the comparison, I found a wonderfully idiosyncratic record that lands directly in that sweet spot between shoegaze and post rock that I love so much—bad hip hop parody artwork aside.

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Record #900: Failure – Fantastic Planet (1996)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Throughout music history, there are several records that have a mismatched ratio of commercial success to lasting influence. Albums like Velvet Underground & Nico, of which it is often said that not many people listened to it, but everyone who listened to it started a band. Albums that made little impact on the larger cultural conversation but left an extinction-event-sized crater in those who heard them.

Fantastic Planet is one of those albums. It is a record that was mostly ignored upon its release, but history has reevaluated it as a revered classic.

And rightly so: thanks to its blend of HUMmy space rock, Jawboxy abrasiveness, Smashing Pumpkins guitar work, and Nirvana-esque hooks, Fantastic Planet is arguably the most concise distillation of 90s alt rock ever produced, and hits just even harder three decades later.

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Record #889: Calm Collapse – Mirrored Nature (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

I say a lot of words about music. I have this blog, I write reviews for Tuned Up and the occasional other publication, I have a music podcast…at any given moment I might have two or three group chats prattling on about new releases, hidden gems, or reminders that certain records are as good as I remember.

But sometimes, all of that does a poorer job of communicating the pure essence of my reaction to a piece of music than a simple two-word reaction. In this case, “holy shit,” which escaped my dropping jaw about thirty seconds into album opener “Positive Greed.” And as the record continued on, I didn’t find much reason to refine my reaction.

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Record #878: Duster – Together (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In a day and age where anyone with a smartphone can record an album themselves and distribute it around the world for free, it’s easy to forget the depths of obscurity that the cult bands of yesteryear trudged through.

Take for instance the slowcore outfit Duster, whose two full lengths in 1999 and 2000 received very little attention at the time. But with the emergence of social media and streaming, the few devoted fans of those records started finding each other and spread the word of Duster like gospel. The cult grew so much that eighteen years later, the band reunited, reissuing those two LPs and writing new ones.

And they haven’t missed a beat. Together, their second record since resurrecting, finds the band playing their personal brand of spaced-out, hazy slowcore with so much conviction that you might expect them to have been released twenty years ago.

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Record #858: Cave In – Heavy Pendulum (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Cave In have often been described as chameleons. However, those tree-dwelling lizards can really only change their color, which is a poor analog for the Boston quartet’s sonic shapeshifting abilities. They’re more like some sort of Lovecraftian cephalopod, changing its color, shape, and size at will. From the brutal metalcore of their early records to the soaring space rock of Antenna, Cave In has thrived on reinventing themselves.

But on Heavy Pendulum, they somehow manage to fit every facet of their career into a single—albeit massive—record. They follow all of their seemingly contradictory instincts to their breaking points, creating what might be the most Cave In-y Cave In record of all time.

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Record #743: Entropy – Liminal (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

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.

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Record #722: HUM – Inlet (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In the twenty-five years since the release of You’d Prefer an Astronaut, the musical landscape has been filled with bands that exist at the altar of HUM. The combination of doom metal heaviness, laid back vocal delivery, and major key melodies that HUM delivered on that breakthrough has inspired everyone from Deftones to Cave In to Quicksand to Cloakroom to Spotlights to The Life & Times to True Widow…I could go on.

But now, two decades after going on hiatus, HUM has released a new record that proves that they’re still the kings of space rock. And it might just be their best ever.

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