Posts Tagged ‘Shoegaze’

Girls Under Glass – Backdraft

Posted: 21 May 2023 in Albums
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Dependent Records – 2nd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Now in their twenty-seventh year, Girls Under Glass return after an extended break – of some seventeen years – with a new album that wasn’t wholly planned. As the bio notes, explain, when they started composing some new tracks for an EP to round off a planned boxset of their complete works, ‘The fire reignited and songs kept coming… [they] understood that their batteries had recharged to bursting point after a 17-year break and the projected EP turned into a full-length.

The trouble with being forerunners and progenitors is that time catches up. What was innovative at one time becomes assimilated, absorbed: ‘influential’ becomes commonplace, however much you keep moving. And while Backdraft shows that Girls Under Glass have progressed, it also shows how external elements have, too – even within the spheres of post-punk and goth, which on the face of things, haven’t evolved all that much. Emerging bands are still emulating The Cure and The Sisters of mercy circa 1985, and oftentimes if feels as if these are genres locked in time – but then, the same is also true of punk, and contemporary grunge acts.

At least Girls Under Glass can lay justified claim to being there at the time and laying the foundation stones for the sound that endures over thirty years on, and they’re fully accepting that this new outing draws on the sound and sensations of their previously active years in the 80s and 90s. ‘Night Kiss’ brings all the synth-goth vibes where early New Order and third-wave goth acts like Suspiria meet, but there’s much to chew on across the ten songs on Backdraft. ‘Tainted’ – which features Mortiis on guest vocals – has a more industrial feel – but that’s industrial in the way that Rosetta Stone drew on Nine Inch Nails for Tyranny of Inaction than Ministry. It’s got grit and magnetic bubbling synths and some hard grooves, but the aggression is fairly restrained.

Single cut ‘We Feel Alright’ has a vintage vibe and sits in the bracket of ‘uplifting goth’ – it may not bee recognised as a thing, but it sure is, and propelled by a pumping disco beat, it’s one of those songs that brims with an energy that makes you want to raise your arms and your face to the sky as you’re carried away on the driving rhythm and expansive synths and guitars.

The six-minute ‘No Hope No Fear’ blissfully ventures into Disintegration-era Cure stylings, with a bold, cinematic approach, while ‘Everything Will Die’ is a quintessential slab of Numanesque electrogoth It’s uptempo, even poppy, but it’s dark, and if the Hi-NRG pumping of ‘Endless Nights’ is a shade cliché, but they redeem the dip with the sparse six-minute ‘Heart on Fire’ with its sepulchral synths, before erupting into an epic climax that’s like a shoegaze / synthwave take of Fields of the Nephilim.

Ultimately, Backdraft is a solid album: its roots are deeply retro, and it’s not one hundred percent hit, but it’s a solid addition to the catalogue of a band whose longevity speaks for itself.

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Watch: ‘Save’ by Argonaut

Posted: 6 May 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Reviewed here recently, ‘Save’ is May’s song from Argonaut’s ‘open-ended’ album, Songs from the Black Hat.

The lyrics were inspired by the Thai cave rescue and a genuine primary school comprehension test answer to the question ‘why didn’t Grace Darling save everyone at the same time?’ Clocking in at six and a half minutes, Save is Argonaut channelling nineties indie anthem 12 inch remixes a la MBV and the Telescopes.

They’ve just unveiled a video to accompany it, which you can watch here:

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The Noise Who Runs – Preteretrospective

Posted: 4 April 2023 in Albums
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21st April 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ve been trying to wrap both my tongue and my brain around the title of this album for what feels like an age: it’s something of a linguistic conundrum. Depending on your interpretation, ‘preter’ is either ‘more than’ or ‘past’ (which becomes a tautology when paired with the ‘retro’ of ‘retrospective’. Not that this is a retrospective in any conventional sense, being a collection of new material from The Noise Who Runs, a duo based in France, consisting of Ian Pickering, perhaps best known as one of the Sneaker Pimps.

It’s perhaps not entirely surprising that there’s a vaguely trip-hop feel to some of the songs on this varied and sprawling album which equally carries a dark 80s vibe – meaning that there are some really deftly layered arrangements and a lot of space in which to wander and explore the sounds and your own internal monologue while listening to Preteretrospective.

We’re steered into the album via the singles released in advance of the release, most recently ‘2poor2die’, which places the socio-political leanings of the pair to the fore and lands slap in the middle of the album as a towering centrepiece.

But it starts with another single, and the first song, ‘Beautiful Perhaps’ owes much to Disintegration-era Cure, but through a filter of She Wants Revenge: that is to say, it’s a contemporary take on a retro style, and it’s well done. This is true of the album as a whole. Perhaps my appreciation of trip-hop has always been because it has a certain hazy darkness about it, which to my ear renders it a cousin to goth and shoegaze.

‘Off the Rails’ incorporates elements of Dub and reggae, with an insistent marching beat and nagging bass groove dominating an otherwise sparse arrangement reminiscent of a more electronic reimagining of The Specials – with social commentary to match.

‘Somewhere Between Dogs and Wolves’ is a slow, atmospheric groover that really draws you in slowly: it’s pop, but it’s dark, minimal, with some pretty harrowingly visual lyrics. It’s compelling listening, and resonates in a way that nothing that qualifies as pop now can touch. ‘So Good it’s Free’ owes aspects of its melody to ‘Boorn Slippy’, but is a mellow shoegaze / acoustic song that sits apart from most protest songs – and make no mistake, this is a protest song. For all the mellow tones – look no further than the shuffling, jangling indie of ‘Zoe’s Edible Garden’ for evidence of the rather twee 90s indie that would be a prominent feature of John Peel’s show circa ‘93 – Preteretrospective has much depth alongside its range. This brings us to ‘2poor2die’, which is pretty bleak and brimming with frustrated energy.

As the press for the single points out, ‘the spiritual centrepiece of this 14-track offering, ‘2poor2die’ addresses the growing inequality in society and the struggle of the unheard / unseen decent people without voices and increasingly without hope. It is, at once, a celebration of ordinary bravery in the face of the daily grind of routine and a condemnation of the eternal ideology that sees working people as cannon fodder, only to be told “Shut up and get on with it, nothing’s gonna change”. Call it a tribute to the folks who are barely considered worth considering by the powers that be.’

With the chasm between the haves and have-nots yawning ever wider, this is punchy and on-point, sadly. But hearing such politics without the hectoring delivery of Sleaford Mods is welcome, not least of all because it really does represent the groundswell of opposition to oppression. There’s a reason why pretty much every profession is striking right now. Yes, we’re all being shafted, and we all need to take a stand.

Preteretrospective is a complex beast: a strongly contemporary album with retro stylings which confronts contemporary issues. At times it’s quite dancey, but whereas so often in the past dance equated to the escapism of clubtastic euphoria, with or without chemical enhancement, Preteretrospective is clear-eyed, clear-headed and irritated.

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The Noise Who Runs 3 - photo by Théo Valenduc

Photo by Théo Valenduc

KILN – Holo [2022 Remaster]

Posted: 7 March 2023 in Albums
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Keplar Keplar – 3rd March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

However much you think you know about music, there is always more to learn. And so it transpired that Holo was first released in 1998 and is ‘one of those rare records that managed to carve out a niche of its own while also building bridges to variety of genres like Chicago-style post-rock, the ambient mysticism of projects like Rapoon or the music made at the intersection of shoegaze, and electronic music in the late 1990s.’

Where have I been? Living in a cultural vacuum? Hardly. And yet this is my first encounter with KILN. And I’ve not heard of Rapoon and have no knowledge of Chicago-style post-rock either. Chicago house, I’m aware of, but… well, I daresay I’m not alone, and so this reissue off Holo may well prove to provide an introduction, and an entry point to the trio’s supposedly niche-carving brand of ambience.

It’s an album that’s rich in detail and texture, from clanking, clattering tin can percussion and big sweeps of amorphous sonic clouds that wash and crash in waves.

It’s hard to decipher precisely what’s what – is that a didgeridoo or just a digital drone? It’s impossible to unravel the layers and determine the individual sources as glugs and gurgles slide in between soft dulcimer-like notes and easy beats that bubble between all kinds of textures and tones which drift and slide and groan and drone in and out of the ever-shifting fabric of this fascinating album. Guitars and extraneous sounds flit and flicker in and out while instant drums nag and boom. At times it’s new age, at times it’s more tribal, and Holo pushes ambience in numerous directions.

There are segments – interludes, breaks, fragments – where this is a catalogue of challenging source materials melted together. At others, it’s altogether less challenging and simply washes of you in a soft breeze.

For an album that’s so chilled, there is much happening on Holo¸ and as much as it is an album to chill to, first and foremost it’s an album to explore.

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Watch: ‘Cymbeline’ by Terzo

Posted: 26 February 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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‘Terzo’ : an Italian word translating as ‘the third’, it represents an additional presence that new darkwave/shoegaze/post-rock duo Terzo sensed inhabiting their most creative moments when they began working together.

Karl Clinton (former bassist in post-punk act Diskoteket, plus co-founder of improvisational project Tsantsa) and Billie Lindahl (lead singer and guitarist in dream pop/dark folk act Promise and the Monster) share a mutual penchant for dark sounding music in all its forms. They have also both been itching to free the shackles binding them to strict timelines; not only those of the music industry, but society in general. “Terzo was born out of a discussion about songs we mutually liked and a wish to try a different work process to our then current projects,” they state. “We wanted to do whatever we wanted without restrictions, using our obsession and gut feeling as guidance.”

Their preference for music and art that embodies a degree of doom and gloom is evident on their upcoming self-titled debut album, with its central theme of ‘love and death’ linking all six tracks. Their very first studio session yielded the 10+ minute post-rock epic ‘Cymbeline’ (available now as a debut single), while in the midst of recording it they both had the sensation that a third presence was keeping them company. Intrigued by the thought, “we started talking about the appearance of a third element, in sleep and in dreams,” they explain. “Terzo is about acknowledging this, the swirl that light in the darkness generates, opening ourselves out toward our own weaknesses.”

‘Cymbeline’ is actually a unique cover of a 1991 song by the Celtic/world music singer-songwriter and composer Loreena McKennit, which has a lyric lifted from the William Shakespeare play of the same name. “We had a feeling that we could make something interesting with it,” says Lindahl. “Karl did most of the instrumental work, guitars and programming, while I recorded my vocal in one take. This song means so much to us because it was the first thing we did as a duo and I think we just sort of understood that we could do great things together.”

Terzo travelled to New York in the summer of 2022 to play their first live shows, with the video maker and photographer Johan Lundsten accompanying them to document the trip. Footage from this can be seen in the video for ‘Cymbeline’, with Lindahl adding that “we always pictured something in documentary style for this song. Johan filmed everything that we did, even just hanging around. It is very raw, but it feels right.”

Watch the captivating video to this immense song here:

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TERZO | photography by Johan Lundsten

Watch: ‘1,2,3’ by Rogue Jones

Posted: 18 February 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Like much of the album, this song was initially composed by Bethan on the piano. It features Ynyr and Bethan on trumpets but also features Ioan Hefin, the man responsible for performing Welsh music’s greatest and most iconic trumpet solo in Eryr Wen’s Gloria Tyrd Adre. It’s a song about love and the feeling of trying to comprehend the magnitude of the love that you can feel for someone. It can relate to any form of love but in this instance it was written when their daughter turned 3 years old, with Bethan trying to articulate and comprehend the outpouring of love felt for a child and the hugeness of childbirth; the challenge, escalation, triumph, glory and the raw vulnerability of it all.

Watch the video here:

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Listen: ‘Creep’ by Midas Fall

Posted: 12 February 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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As anyone who ever listened to the legendary BBC radio DJ John Peel will know, hearing a favourite artist re-interpret a familiar song by another artist can bring new insights into both, as well as being a lot of fun.

During a break from writing Midas Fall’s fifth album, Elizabeth Heaton took some ideas that had been incubating for a while and, along with bandmate Michael Hamilton, applied their own unique perspective to three well-loved songs by Bruce Springsteen (Dancing in the Dark), Radiohead (Creep) and Placebo (Every You Every Me).

Covers EP sees Springsteen’s driving rock anthem reimagined as a quieter, more introspective narrative, imbued with ‘80s synths and Heaton’s softly hopeful but uncertain vocals. Radiohead’s Creep is a dreamy, kaleidoscopic waltz that slowly builds to a raging climax. On Every You Every Me, the icy undertones of Placebo’s original version are magnified even further, evoking a bleak landscape cloaked in dark, haunting sounds.

For first single ‘Creep’ Liz from the band states,  “Creep, along with the other tracks on the upcoming EP were created during lockdown. We took some of our favourite tracks from growing up and gave them a different feel. As a teenager Radiohead were the first band to make me feel that music could be something more, so have been a massive influence to me musically, especially when I first started writing. I was listening to Creep and imagined it played in a waltz style time signature. With the aid of my keyboard and a glass of wine the vocals seemed to flow very easily and were captured in a single take. From there it grew arms and legs."

Listen here:

Covers EP will be released digitally worldwide by Monotreme Records on 7th April.

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Remote Viewing – Modern Addictions

Posted: 1 February 2023 in Albums
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Human Worth – 3rd February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

A shriek of feedback prefaces the gnarly blast of a monster rhythm section, thunderous drums paired with a snarling bass. And so begins ‘Short Distance Runner’, the first of six songs on Remote Viewing’s Modern Addictions. You know in an instant that it’s going to be good.

Of course, you know it’s going to be good before you hear a single sound.

Featuring members of Palehorse, Million Dead, Sly & The Family Drone, Nitkowski and Wound (to name but a few) is quite the underground supergroup. Plus, Modern Addictions is being released on Human Worth, which is in itself a guarantee of heavy, noisy shit of the highest calibre. So yes, you know it’s going to be good. But even then, it’s hard to be braced for something this good.

The guitar alternates between thick, sludgy chords and really sinewy lead lines that buzz and drill, twist and bend and wrap themselves around you and dig in like barbed wire. The tracks are backed back to back, making the cumulative effect of the heavy battering even more acutely felt. Single cut ‘Your Opinion is Wrong’, showcased here in December is broadly representative of the dense, chunky, churning sound of the album as a whole, but doesn’t fully convey the extent of its textures and variety.

It’s not all punishing density, and the band are keen to highlight that theirs is a sound that demonstrates a ‘broader sound that incorporates elements of hardcore, post-rock and shoegaze into the palette of sludge and noise-rock’.

There are some tight grooves amidst the racket, ‘Wasted on Purpose’ effortlessly transitions through a number of varied passages, from full-on balls-out riffage to delicate, evocative swirling post-rock chimes which gracefully convey a very different kind of emotional weight, and if the title ‘Cleveland Balloonfest ‘86’ suggests something bright and airy, sonically it’s more the Hindenburg disaster with it’s slow, low-slung growling guitar that grinds away at a crawl for six and a half anguish-filled minutes.

If ‘Watch Me For the Changes’ is a demonic dirge of epic proportions with a remarkably light ending (and you can’t help but suspect the title is perhaps a reference to the band’s directions for playing it) ,the final track, ‘A.B.B.A. ABBA’ springs an unexpected surprise as the band switch into disco mode. No, of course it doesn’t really. It’s seven minutes of dolorous doom, thick with atmosphere and dripping distortion. It’s the sound of weight so great that it feels as if it’s collapsing in on itself, decaying and crumbling on the way to a slow death, that leaves you feeling hollowed out and devastated. It’s the perfect finale to a superlative album.

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Listen: ‘Night Fell’ by Hibou

Posted: 6 January 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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HIBOU is back with new single ‘Night Fell’, along with the announcement of a new EP ‘Arc’ (due 13 January 2023).

Floating through a breezy blend of gossamer vocals, twinkling instrumentals and lush textured melodies, “Night Fell” is a delicate and jangling track that paves the way for Hibou’s new EP ‘Arc’.

Born in Seattle and now based in Paris, ‘Arc’ is Hibou’s first release since his 2019 full-length LP ‘Halve’ and the new body of work sees the artist emerge from his lengthy silence and reel listeners right back into the glistening whirlwind of his sound.

A delicate blend of lo-fi alt-pop, nostalgic shoegaze and diaphanous dream-pop, Peter Michel (aka Hibou) spent the summer writing the EP along the Canal de l’Ourcq, before recording in various apartments, bathrooms and rehearsal spaces in Paris. Engineered and produced by Michel himself, the multi-instrumentalist also performs vocals, guitar and bass on each track, with drums courtesy of Jase Ihler.

A dreamy and diverse project, ‘Arc’ melds together a rich amalgam of sounds: from the delicate and dazing “June”  to the buzzing and buoyant “Already Forgotten” and from the eerie twanging guitars on “Devilry” to the stormy, seesawing soundscapes on “Upon The Clouds You Weep”.

Taking its name from “an electric arc between things, or arc lightning”, ‘Arc’ is both sentimental and stylish with its carefully composed melodies seeming to tap into long-forgotten, hazy memories from the past just as easily as it does bolster hope for the future.

Inspired by shoegaze greats both past and present, Hibou’s elegant arrangements are hard to pin down, falling somewhere between the indie-rock tinted musings of Beach Fossils and DIIV, the folk-flecked intimacies of Alex G and the tenderly tormented sound of The Cure.

Listen to ‘Night fell’ here:

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The Yets – The Yets

Posted: 18 December 2022 in Singles and EPs
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12th December 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

The eponymous debut EP by South Carolina indie pop-rock duo The Yets is steeped in the tropes of quintessential vintage alternative pop, absorbing a range of influences, while keeping a clear eye on classic and ultimately accessible forms – embracing Fleetwood Mac and Cocteau Twins in equal measure, as the press release suggests with remarkable accuracy.

Robin Wilson has a superb voice, delicate, emotive, easy on the ear, and at the same time rich and gutsy. It’s key to the sound of The Yets, and the six songs on this debut EP really showcase both her versatility and that of their songwriting.

There’s a weird booming sound – not quite a beat, not quite a bass note – that cuts through the mellow drift of ‘Waterline’, and it’s one of those things that once you’re attuned to it, you can’t detune, like the duck in Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Night’ or the cowbell on ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’, but if you can ignore it, it’s a superbly-executed song with a clean guitar chug that keep it moving along nicely while the lead guitar chimes and washes melodically.

‘Remember’ is perfection, a layered, easy alt-rock tune that’s Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’ and it floats along in a dreamy drift that closes out with a delicate guitar solo.

They strip things right back for ‘Lesser Evil’, which swings between brooding indie and moody post-punk with hints of Siouxsie, before spinning into ethereal shoegaze territory on the dreamy ‘Letter to a Boy’, which really does find the band revelling in the misty ethereal shadows of Cocteau Twins.

‘Fades to Grey’ makes an obvious reference to Visage, and the band’s 80s leanings are on clear display, but that’s where the connection severs: this is a smooth, atmospheric rippling piece with chiming, echo-heavy guitar that owes much to Disintegration-era Cure, and ‘Happy Now’ builds on that thickly atmospheric sound with a loping rhythm and layers of vocals that really fill out the sound as the guitars and it’s the most overtly goth song of the set.

With a broad pallet of tuneful wistfulness and textured, layered instrumentation, coupled with some smart and sensitive production, The Yets have landed with a seriously accomplished debut: there’s a lot happening here, and there’s a significant range but at the same time a cohesive feel to it.

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The Yets 4 - photo by Gordon Backman

Photo: Gordon Backman

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