Posts Tagged ‘bedroom indie’

Plastic Ideas – Afterglow

Posted: 6 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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28th February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ve had a few interesting conversations about Shoegaze in the last couple of weeks. Largely – and massively – maligned in the UK music press at the time, many of the leading exponents of the style in the 90s – Ride, Slowdive, Chapterhouse – had all formed in the late 80s and had petered out by the mid-90s. What goes around comes around, and both Ride and Slowdive have been enjoying second careers following a significant shoegaze renaissance spearheaded by younger, up-and-coming acts like Pale Blue Eyes and BDRMM. But I learned that amongst my friends and peers, the genre remains divisive, perceived by some as wishy-washy, and described by one of my friends as ‘music for people too lazy to have a wank’. Personally, I find I’m too busy, rather than too lazy, and have been enjoying the resurgence, while aware that there is a danger that the next couple of years could see Shoegaze reaching the kind of saturation we saw with Post-Rock in 2006. Because it is possible to have too much of a good thing, especially when bills contain three or even four bands who all sound more or less identical.

But it transpires that this is not necessarily the same outside of the UK, and while Pale Blue Eyes and BDRMM are packing out venues of increasing sizes with each tour, over in Turkey, remains a marginal interest, although it is starting to gain traction. And at the forefront of this are Plastic Idea, formed in Istanbul in 2019.

Afterglow is their second album, following Bakiyesi Belirsiz Ömrüm (My Life With an Obscure Remainder) released in 2022. Like its predecessor, Afterglow was recorded, mixed and mastered completely by Berkan Çalışkan in his bedroom, although this time around, five of the album’s eight tracks bear titles in English.

The band write that ‘although there is a general melancholy throughout the album, brief moments of hope are also evident,’ pointing to the title track, as well as ‘bedroom-poppy vibes like in ‘Some Days’ and post-punky feels like in ‘Yıldızlar Düştü Gökyüzünden’. The album’s cover bears all the hallmarks of a reference to My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, and there’s no doubt some influence here.

It’s the title track which launches the album, beginning with chiming, picked, clean guitar before a cascade of overdrive crashes in simultaneous with bass and drums. The song continues to exploit the quiet / loud dynamic between verses and choruses, the vocals floating in a wash of reverb. It’s pleasant, but nothing particularly remarkable, but that changes with ‘I Wanna Fall In Love’, which is altogether darker, more haunting, with some undefinable blend of desperation and menage in the vocal delivery which reverberates amidst fractal, crystalline guitars. It’s as much post-punk, even shaded with hues of gith, as it is shoegaze.

‘Some Days’ drips with downtempo melancholy and echoes of early Ride, while ‘Kolay Mı Yaşamak; is a real standout, with a snaking psyche-hued guitar shimmering through the verses before a full-blooded grunge blast of a chorus, and ‘Yıldızlar Düştü Gökyüzünden’, too, delivers a surging finale with an attack that’s more the sound of angst than floppy moping, and the six-minute closer, ‘Don’t Let Them Bring You Down’ goes epic, and if the solo’s overplayed, it still works in context.

While I’m personally a fan of the genre, pitching Afterglow as a shoegaze album may deter some from exploring an album that’s wide-ranging and pretty gutsy in parts. Afterglow offers edge and dynamics, and is a far cry from the wishy-washy vagueness that’s often synonymous with shoegaze.

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Eric Copeland – Dumb It Down

Posted: 5 October 2020 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

Eric Copeland, operating outside of his main musical outlet of Black Dice, continues his understates solo career with the discreet release of Dumb it Down. It’s almost as if he’s on a campaign of anti-promotion, and would prefer his work to spread by word of mouth and osmosis. There’s a perverse logic in that, which corresponds with his unusual career trajectory: bursting onto the scene as an act with decidedly hardcore leanings, Black Dice released a slew of singles and Eps between 1998 and 2000 that charted their evolution towards abrasive experimental noise, before an unexpected swerve saw their debut album in 2002 present expansive pieces of an infinitely more chilled-out nature.

Having subsequently influenced – and crossed over with – Animal Collective who, they put in contact with the Fat Cat Records label back in 2003, Black Dice may have been somewhat eclipsed and Copeland’s solo work existing some way below the radar.

Dumb it Down isn’t exactly a hugely commercial proposition, to be fair: the title track is the first on the album and while it got a sort of bouncy feel to it, with hints of early Wire, Suicide, Stooges, and Cabaret Voltaire tossed together and blended with a psychedelic twist, most of it’s buried in so much murk: it’s fuzzy, bassy, and sounds like a demo recorded on a condenser mic. But then, it’s cool, because it also sounds like a lot of the stuff on the Pebbles compilation series. So yes, it sounds more like a lost gem than a contemporary work, and this is true of the album as a whole.

Across the album’s ten tracks, all of which are so swampy that they sound as if they’ve been recoded from underwater, or from the next room. There are some viable sabs of electro-funk, with hints of Taking Heads and dashes of 80s robotix all churned in together, but it seems to have been recorded and mixed to deliberately undermine any commercial potential. In the past, commenting on the likes of The fall, Pavement, and Silver Jews among others, I’ve suggested that lo-fi production or not, you can’t keep a good song down, but Copeland has seemingly gone out of his way to absolutely fucking bury an entire album’s worth f good song – give or take.

There are strains of Silver Apples’ analogue tripouts which emerge from the dark depths, ‘Motorcycles’ sounds like Suicide playing ‘Louie Louie’ in a basement bar three blocks away. And far from dumbing things down as the title suggests, this album presents a real challenge to the listener, namely ‘do you have the patience?’ Well, do you? Such patience is rewarded, however much frustration the audio levels may cause, because the no-fi primitivism is, ultimately, integral to the experience of the album.

The MP3 age has made us snobbish about fidelity – and the trend for 180gm vinyl pressings likewise. And some may say that there’s no excuse for rough, sloppy recordings anymore, but anyone who recalls or has a taste for lo-fi, be it 60s psych, late 70s / early 80s bedroom 4-tracking will vouch for the way in which this kind of stuff can touch the listener in ways which resonate beyond the articulable. Ultimately, Dumb It Down is lowkey, lo-fi and low-impact, and I like it.

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