Aural Aggravation

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.

AA