Categories
Discover Feature Review

Always louder than before: Keep

I was lucky enough to see Keep live last year. They were playing the They’re Gonna Be Big festival in Paris. While I personally am delighted to have been able to catch their (flawless) set and to get to meet the band right after, the ‘gonna be‘ feels like it was a waste of breath and poster space. With ten years, three full lengths and a bunch of EPs scattered behind them, Keep are not new to the scene. Then again, for all their experience, they are also wayyyyy too accessible. I was the first one at the merch table that day and I didn’t have to elbow a single other person to get there. It’s weird. Keep should already be big.

They seem to be on the way though. Their first EP Hypnosis for Sleep was out in 2014 and the reactions at the time were more than encouraging. We then needed to wait till 2017 for them to release their first LP, For Your Joy (though we did get the excellent Psychorama in the interim). For Your Joy must have made some waves as well, because I found a snippet of an article I had started (but never published) from around the time of its release. But I think I – and a lot of us – only really sat up and took notice of Keep in 2023 with the release of Happy in Here.

What did it for you? My trigger was ‘In The Deep’ – a terrible choice because I’ll never get to hear it live. ‘In the Deep’ isn’t made to hype up a small, expectant crowd in an intimate venue. It’s built for headphones and solitude and it’s only the strongest among us who can stop themselves from circling, spiraling, sinking into it. Me, I’m weak.

Keep have mastered the art of melancholy, treading a hazy slackline between distance and intimacy. Is it because their vocalist is stashed behind a drumkit at the back of the room that his voice floats over to us like something from a midnight reverie? Or is the feeling engineered, does it come from a place of purpose and intent?

It’s sooooo easy to lose yourself to Keep. I keep coming back to Happy in Here, convinced that this time I’ll be over it. But it doesn’t get boring and I just end up drifting along its wisps and echoes and each time feels a little bit like the first time.

There are two kinds of Keep tracks – there are the driving, dark, post-punk inspired ones (like ‘Air’ up there). And then there are the mellower, twinkly – but still dark – shoegaze ones, (like ‘Start to Wonder’ down here). I love both Keeps, but I’ll always gravitate towards the latter’s grime and grunge.

Almost Static, released a couple of months ago, is Keep settling into their sound. It’s a natural, polished successor to Happy in Here, which itself radiates a self-assurance we hadn’t heard in previous releases. The tracks on Almost Static are punchy, unapologetic and… way too short?

Album opener and lead single, ‘Fun Facts’, is That Track™ – so clean, so hooky, and so true to Keep and their ✨vibe✨. Its structure is as perfect as a pop song’s. It’s also about as short as one. At just over two and a half minutes it  sucks you in with immaculate interplay between verse, bridge and chorus. And then, just as you’re getting ready for round two, it crumples into a little ball of distortion and tosses itself out, leaving you to finish up on your own. It’s not fair. You deserve longer. WE deserve longer.

You don’t really get the time to wallow in the injustice of it all, though. You almost don’t get the time to breathe as ‘Smile Down (Into Nothing)’, ‘Decoy’ and ‘Bermuda’ – all cut from the same cloth as ‘Fun Facts’ – come hammering down on you with their louds and softs, their slows and fasts, their tension and release.


Their successor, ‘New Jewelry’, isn’t like that, and it’s my favourite example of Keep’s mastery of the bridge. If this was any other track, I’d consider it pretty standard slow-gaze. But there’s this ONE line that pops up right in the middle. It lasts something between 5 to 7 seconds – and that one line elevates the entire track to mythic status. You’ll know it when you hear it, (but if you don’t it’s 1:53 – 2:00).

Strong sonic identifiers make a comeback on the grim ‘No Pulse’ which could easily have been the album’s lead single, but I suspect the janglier, poppier ‘Sodawater’ was the more accessible choice. There’s also a track called ‘Gasoline’ which is evidently infallible because when has any song named ‘Gasoline’ not been a banger?

Closer ‘Hurt a Fly’ is the album showcase track on Bandcamp, but I’m not quite sure why because, while it is excellent as a final track, it is not an album-definer to me the way the first four are.

Keep are back in Paristown this autumn, and I couldn’t be more excited. They’re going to be opening for Slow Crush. Now don’t get me wrong, I love Slow Crush and I’m thrilled to see them play live. But I’ll be honest – I got the tickets for Keep.

Categories
Album Feature Rediscover

Help, I can’t figure out Sunbather

I’ve been shoegazing for a couple of decades now and as time goes on and as time gets scarce I have to admit that, ethereal vocals are cool and all, but I like my shoegaze with more seasoning. I like a bit of metal (scream for me), a bit of grunge (dirty, crunchy riffs like velcro on my eardrums) and a bit of doom (bass so heavy the bones in my skull vibrate).

So by all accounts I should LOVE Deafheaven. I’ve been listening to Alcest since Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde released in 2007 and every album, every concert since then has been a transcendental experience. APTBS’s Exploding Head is my spirit album, while ‘ To Fix the Gash in Your Head’ was my lifé’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Jesu’s ‘Friends are Evil’ pumps me up like nothing else on my way to work. And of course, I could write (and have written) tomes about Whirr and Nothing, whose Venn diagram with Deafheaven sees Nick Bassett at the centre. *

And yet…

Let’s start at the end.

Deafheaven released Infinite Granite in 2021. At this point I am well aware that Sunbather is a monument of an album not to be disrespected… but I can’t get into it. I’ve tried, and I have never felt the tiniest flutter in my heart when listening to it. I hide this shameful fact from my peers, but I discover that I do like Infinite Granite and in that moment, there is hope.

Infinite Granite doesn’t rock my world, but the blasé vocals remind me of Hum, and the metal influence seems mostly limited to the percussion and the odd scream here and there, as if engineered for shoegaze purists. My only turn off is exactly that – it is strangely accessible, and I wonder if there’s a catch.

I work backwards. I recall listening to Ordinary Corrupt Human Love a while (months? years?) ago, without any strong reactions either way. I go back to sample the album again and, since my taste has matured with time, I can almost enjoy it. I mentioned that I like metal as seasoning, and that’s what I get. The melody at the fore, the growls as decor. I follow the lyrics. I find them strangely poetic. I listen to the album a few times, over the course of a couple of weeks. It never hits me, but I grow to appreciate it, listening only to admire its structure, but never for emotional or spiritual release.

I decide I’m ready to give Sunbather another go.

At this point, there are albums that I actively like that I have listened to less often than Sunbather, but I cannot bring myself to accept that this album speaks a language I don’t understand… yet am fluent in. I have to break the code.

I need help. I turn to the album’s frighteningly detailed wikipedia page for more context. I scroll past all the lists, ratings and reviews – best albums of 2013, best albums of the 2010s, best albums of the millennium, 9.5, 9.2, 9.7, 100, masterful, poetic, groundbreaking… (all knives to my heart, they make question my ears… am I deaf?). I stop at the section on the recording process.

I figure out that I have to look at the album as a series of songs and interludes. There are four songs, and there are three interludes. They are all meant to complete each other and the whole album is meant to be listened to in one sitting. That’s cool, I’m an album person so that’s exactly what I’ve been doing all along.

I am well aware that wikipedia should not be my sole source of information and perspective, so I decide to scout around a little bit more. I also want to hear the voice of the people, not just the critics. Over on last.fm, it’s once again adoring comment after adoring comment on their shoutbox: ‘masterpiece’, ‘soul-crushingly beautiful’, ‘greatest album ever’ nya-nya-nya, but wait, what’s this:

Mfs on metallum coping hard

Hold up, there is a section of the population out there that does NOT love, admire and adore Sunbather? Maybe these are my people!

I head over to Encyclopedia Metallum. Sure enough, Sunbather’s page has a series of terrible scores ranging from 0 to 15% left by amateur reviewers (the latest as recent as October 2024). This seems a bit extreme, but hey it could just be human tendency to exaggerate. I go to check out the reviews.

These are not my people.

The metal community is pretty weird. It’s the one audience that seems to ALSO not understand Sunbather… but for exactly the opposite reasons? The album is “as if emos and edgy hipsters got ahold of black metal”, “looks like (they) could have a 25 minute long artisanal coffee brewing process every morning while listening to the New York Times podcast” and my favourite : “where the fuck are the lyrics? Where’s the vocalist? Is he in the other room half the time when he’s singing?” – lol.

The reviews are a fun read and a lot more revealing than the professional critics’ scores. There are a fair few 80-100%s thrown in as well, and reading them all makes me realise that I’ve been missing a crucial ingredient all this time – context.

So, since I spend 80% of my waking hours listening to music doused in reverb, I probably don’t have any memory of what non-shoegaze music sounds like anymore. Walls of sound and distortion are my default, so I don’t even register them as an artistic choice. But that’s probably not the case for black metal where (I imagine) vocals and instrumentation are more distinct and more aggressive. I might find this album aggressive enough as is, but I’m a pixie from dreampopland, what do I know?

But out in the real world, along comes Deafheaven – they take the dreamy instrumentation we all know and love, layer black metal vocals over it, and voilà – groundbreaking. You’ve just got yourself every album of the year/decade accolade there is to get.

That’s my theory anyway.

It’s time to try again. I turn off the main speakers and connect my headphones, I buy the remastered version on Bandcamp and download the WAVs. I am nothing if not determined.

I listen to the album in its entirety, as instructed. I focus – I have to because I still struggle to feel anything. I have done my research, I have all the context I could possibly need, and finally I have to admit… there’s still nothing.

I get very close to loving the title track for its break around one minute in. But I don’t love the growls. The song’s structure reminds me of ‘Ecailles de Lune II’, one of my favourites by Alcest – which has a similarly delicate melody, that lifts and falls. This may be where it becomes obvious that I’m a shoegazer and not a metalhead because, unlike Neige, I find Clarke’s screams to not be as concordant with the melody as I would like. I also find ‘Ecailles’ to be much more complex and diverse as a track – there are highs and lows, louds and softs, screams and murmurs, and layers of detail. ‘Sunbather’ the track and Sunbather the album seem to race ahead without much room to breathe. You don’t have the time absorb what you hear, and you don’t necessarily want to go back and lose yourself in the details of the composition. I imagine that’s what the interludes are for, but they do exactly what they say on the tin – they’re more song separators than song extensions. It makes sense considering they were recorded apart from the four main tracks (thanks wikipedia), so there isn’t really an apparent ‘flow’ . You can ignore any reviews saying otherwise – they were never imagined to flow, and they don’t flow.

I do like the interludes though. I dig ‘Windows’ – the field recording of the preacher reminds me of Have a Nice Life’s ‘Destinos’, one of the tracks that changed my life. ‘Please Remember’ is cool too though it’s Neige speaking and why would I listen to that when I could listen to Neige singing? It’s spooky, crunchy and ethereal so I do like that about it. ‘Irresistible’ is fine, I guess. There isn’t anything about it that stands out. It sounds very much like it’s been recorded on a different day and it’s not a track I would ever actively seek out.

In the end, I have to accept Sunbather is not for me. I find myself agreeing with some of the metallum reviews accusing Deafheaven of doing something that has/had already been done. My favourite parts of the albums are the bits that remind me of other artists, but I like the other artists more, so…

I’m disappointed. I really wanted to love this album, but I find it too one-dimensional and piecemeal. I’ve seen Deafheaven being compared to Alcest and I cannot disagree more. It’s the kind of comparison that makes me think of reviews that reference MBV and Slowdive as influences whenever they talk about a shoegaze band, because they’re the only references they have. Maybe Amesoeurs is a better example of a peer, but I’m not qualified to comment on that.

At the end of my study, I’m left with the same question I had when I began: who is this album for, and what are they hearing that I’m not? I’m open to attending listening parties with footnotes and commentary, but until then I guess I’ll just stop pretending to be hardcore, own my roots, and go listen to Infinite Granite.

*Also, their name is an homage to Slowdive, they’ve toured with Russian Circles, and Neige is on ‘Please Remember’. It’s almost TOO perfect.

Categories
Discover Feature Review

Attack of the H-bands: Hayien

Left in you cover art

A series dedicated to the handful of bands that’ve dominated my headphones for the last three or four years and whose names coincidentally all start with H. Am I obsessed with them or are they obsessed with me?

There isn’t much online about Hayien. I don’t know if Hayien is a he/she/they or it. I don’t know if Hayien is American or German or both. All I know is that Hayien has/have been putting out tracks on the reg for the last three years with no breaks, and not a single one of these tracks has been anything less than shoegaze perfection.

It’s absurd. We spend years looking for music that tickles our need for novelty, while remaining cozy and familiar. We want our bands to sound like Slowdive, but we don’t want them to rip off Slowdive. We want them to evolve but to always stay the same. We want them to never quit and be perfect forever.


It sounds impossible, but there have been contenders. I’ve never seen Whirr fail but I did see them quit. Teenage Wrist are also nearly flawless, but there are, like, two songs in their entire discography that I skip. I had high hopes back in the day from APTBS and APOF, but they lost me at their last albums (I really tried, I swear).

And now there’s Hayien.

You’re going to tell me I’m exaggerating, but I’m convinced I’m in the presence of genius. Hayien had me hooked from their very first release. ‘This is magical!’ I said to myself back then, soaking in the early tracks. ‘Branded’, ‘Iosefka’, ‘Acracy’, ‘Love Song Without Love’, ‘Not Yet There is Still One Projectile Left’, ‘Cindr’ and ‘Laminar Flow’ hit me one after the other, and not a single one missed. It felt like I had been combing the beach for scraps of metal and stumbled upon a fountain of gold.

Still not convinced? ‘Iosefka’ is one of the first songs I heard and you can try to tell me if it’s not better than everything Whirr have ever done put together but I won’t hear you. Listen to those layers, listen to the waves and crests, listen to the sadness and hope, listen to that voice and even listen to the lyrics. There is nothing that can make this song any better than it already is.

If I had the choice between never listening to this track again or sacrificing a seminal 90s shoegaze band, I would 100% without hesitation send Ride to the gallows. I pick ‘Iosefka’ over ‘Vapour Trail’, do you see how unhinged that is? Do you see why I say this has to be the work of genius?

Age and the state of the world in general have reinforced my pessimism. In my mind Hayien was a 21st century Ozean – destined to disappear after a handful of perfect tracks and, cruelly, never to achieve the same cult status. Maybe I’d be lucky to get another couple of tracks before then.

But I didn’t realise how unintentionally literal I had been with my ‘this is magical’ statement, because Hayien tossed us a new track every couple of months, and every single one was worth its own song of praise. My pessimism, my cynicism, my skepticism had failed me. None of this should have been possible. And yet here we are. Hayien showed (and continues to show) no signs of letting up. They’ve only been getting more powerful ever since.

I’ll prove it. listen to ‘Tær awæy’ below. It’s relatively more recent, I think it released a few months ago? at the start of the year? I can’t keep track anymore. Same structure. Same vibes. Different song. If you wanted to be critical, you could say ‘hey I don’t know if you noticed but all these tracks sound really similar’ but you have to understand – that is exactly what I want! Give me the same thing over and over again, but make it different every time.

(the ‘æ’ integration gets extra points for obvious reason)

I like to believe that I am a picky, demanding person with unreasonably high expectations. I see myself as that evil Mario Maker 1-1 level with the firesticks. Only Hayien is Mario gliding through like it’s no biggie, and I am seething.


This shouldn’t be possible. And it definitely shouldn’t look so easy.

Anyway, here’s ‘Anyway’.

Categories
Feature

Coming Home: Alcest

I started a lot of posts about bands who I once felt were incapable of making a flawless album, who have then gone on to do it anyway. I never finished those posts, because I’m no longer a subscriber to the opinion that critics need to criticise. There is way too much music available and accessible to spend time on putting down someone’s work. Best let the ones who like it like it and keep my subjectivity to myself. I still love the bands, I’ll still go see them if the opportunity presents itself, and I still want them to do well.

That said, let’s talk about Alcest, who REALLY haven’t made a bad album in the decade+ that I’ve been following them. This is a reality that I only accepted recently when I moved on from Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde and Ecailles de Lune – the two albums I know by heart – and decided to more mindfully listen to the four albums and one EP that they released after. Sure, I’d listened to Les Voyages de l’Ame, Shelter, Kodama, Spiritual Instinct and Le Secret several times over shortly after their release, but never with the same presence I reserved for the first two releases. That is until this year.

I wonder if it’s because Alcest and I have walked a similar evolutionary path, and while Souvenirs and Ecailles are what spoke to me back in 2010, it’s Voyages and Kodama that resonate with me today. I’ve been vibing more ‘heavy’ these past few months, and dreampop isn’t doing it for me (shoegaze is fine, as always). I’m really getting into music with more WEIGHT. It’s nothing new – I’ve been loyal to HANL and Jesu for a while – BUT metal and scream vocals were a different beast.

Yet here I am today, talking about Alcest while listening to Møl and I KNOW I would not have been able to appreciate the latter 5 years earlier (so it’s convenient that they only came into existence 4 years ago…) when I was more into the sweetness and light, and not yet ready for the acid and lead. It’s not that surprising either – the appeal of shoegaze was always the ‘beautiful noise’ and the ‘search’ for a delicate melody under waves of distortion. But I don’t want to float anymore, I want to sink under the weight of noise.

Back to Alcest. I maintain they’re masters of this technique, though from memory I can recall metal message boards being vehemently opposed to the change in style from Amesoeurs. I can understand that perspective today, in the light of my own take on their debut but I wonder if that view has changed (I’m too lazy to go find out). Shelter, Voyages and Kodama sound different but I couldn’t tell you why. When they came out, I lost the hooks they hid in their tracks regardless of how often I listened to them and I’d go back ‘home’ to Souvenirs and Ecailles. That’s OK – I wasn’t ready for ‘Les Jardins de Minuit’ then. But I am today.

This is the kind of evolution I can get behind, and this is is why I come back to albums I may have originally ignored, dismissed or – if I was still an on trend critic – been non-positive about. I have the internet’s content saturation to thank for my liberation from my obligation to comment on albums at the time of release. We need to grow, ruminate and then revisit. We’re not always ready for a sound at the moment it comes out. Maybe we feel the tickle of an emotion  we can’t place. The unfamiliarity makes it so we can’t process what we hear. Then maybe years later it ‘clicks’ and suddenly, everything makes sense.

Full disclosure: I’m still not ready for Sunbather.

Categories
Discover Feature

30 songs that blew my mind (that you probably haven’t heard of) – Part 6

In the three years it took to complete this list, you may have heard of some of these. 

  1. Beat Around The Bush (feat. Somersault) – Nothing 

I had to have a Nothing track on this list, and of course that track would be from their first and finest (don’t @ me for speaking facts) Guilty of Everything. 

Every song speaks to someone, but not everyone could tell you why. This entry was a toss-up between ‘Beat Around The Bush’ and ‘Somersault.’ ‘Somersault’s matter-of-fact simplicity speaks for us. ‘Outside the door the world’s alive/I’ll stay and hide on the other side’ – an empathetic companion at the best of times – and more so in 2020.  

‘Beat Around the Bush’, meanwhile, speaks to us – of an experience, alien and unfamiliar, but one that still resonates. We understand what’s being talked about even though we haven’t quite lived it ourselves. ‘God in men, our souls are spent/can’t be saved, can’t repent’  – if you can’t relate to the religious overtones, you can feel them. It may not tell our story, but we can sit by it and listen. 

  1. Mind the Wires – Tears Run Rings 

Say what you will about music piracy and try to convince yourself that you wouldn’t download a car, but I owe a debt of gratitude to the bootleggers of the mid 2000s who put shoegaze and dreampop mixtapes up to torrent. I downloaded music then, so I know what to pay for now. There is no way I  would have chanced upon Tears Run Rings (among other new-gaze classics) without the mixtape creators, their torrents, their seeders and the mediafire links buried in obscure blogspots.  

It’s a shame ‘Mind The Wires’ came out when it did – in a label-free music non-industry – because it has all the elements that could have made it an iconic shoegaze track if it had come out fifteen years earlier: lyrics hovering above the range of human comprehension, a haunting vocal hook, melancholy and rapture.  

Most incredibly, and like most of their tracks, ‘Mind The Wires’ was recorded remotely. More about their process of creation and AE’s stab at what the lyrics are saying here. 

  1. Low/Lilitu – Blueneck 

Please spare me your righteous anger as, for the fourth time in this series, a single spot is occupied by more than one song. You should be grateful, if anything, to receive more bang for your internet buck.  

Sonic siblings ‘Low’ and ‘Lilitu’ sit three songs apart on Blueneck’s otherworldly The Fallen Host. These are songs that are so expansive, so intricate and layered, they leave you feeling like you’ve lived an entire lifetime by the time they end. Sated, fulfilled, self-actualised, you wait to ascend to a higher plane. But instead of nirvana, you’re met with silence. Then the dull drone of reality fades in as you descend back to the mundane.  

PROTIP: avoid the inevitable deception AND get a bonus sleep aid by playing ‘Low’ and/or ‘Lilitu’ once you’re in bed. I’m pretty sure their cosmic vibrations are in tune with the human body. Melt into moksha and stave off the real world for another 8 hours.  

  1. Restrained in a Moment (I Love You) – The Royal Family and The Poor 

You don’t know this, but I’m a YouTube influencer. In a time before streaming was a thing, I wanted a space where some of my obscure, overlooked discoveries could be preserved*. There’s a whole debate to be had on the ethics of copyright and intellectual property, but the truth is that a) at the time there was no more convenient way to share a song with someone than through a YouTube link, and b) as mentioned, if it wasn’t for the songs shared by other people then, it’s unlikely I’d be supporting my bands financially today.  

I don’t even know how I found The Royal Family and the Poor. it was probably during the phase when I was excavating fossils of the 80s British indie scene. On first listen ‘Restrained in a Moment’ was a masterpiece. Why did it move me so? I was at a loss for words. 

When I uploaded it to YouTube, the comments started coming in – they still do today – and they put words to the feeling I couldn’t describe. Of the handful of videos I shared, this one gets the most heartfelt, emotional and grateful response. I have the words now, but to appreciate the intimacy of the song, just click the video above and go through the comments. 

*Fun Fact: among these obscurities was pinkshinyultrablast’s ‘Blaster’ which was subsequently pulled down when Umi released and they became a big deal. 

  1. Makes No Sense – Soundpool 

Do you know what really makes no sense? There is no other song in the world that sounds anything like the heady disco-shoegaze Soundpool invented with this one track. I would give anything to have an entire album that is composed up of nothing but this goosebumpy nostalgia for a time I never knew. The rest of Mirrors in Your Eyes comes close but even it can’t replicate, the unfiltered warmth, joy and sparkle of ‘Makes No Sense.’ It’s like a comet – you’re  lucky if you experience it in your lifetime. Yet the eternal question remains: how can something so unique sound so, so familiar? 

— 

Categories
Album Discover Feature Review

Spin with me: How I met Peripheral Vision

I dont even know why I bother to keep up with new music when:

a) it’s impossible

b) we all know I’m going to miss out on whatever’s really meaningful because:

  • it’ll be drowned in the infinite deluge of daily new releases
  • my desperate yet passive listening habits mean I’ll blank on it even if it does find its way to my headphones.

Despite the hopelessness of the situation, I do keep a tiny, irregularly updated, and frequently overlooked list of bands/tracks that have caught my attention. It’s a list written on actual paper and therefore prone to the vagaries of the physical world eg. spilled cups of milky tea, inkstains, and general wear and tear from natural forces of erosion.

One of the tracks written on this loved-but-not-consulted scrap of paper is ‘Diazepam’ by Turnover – a song I heard more than once on DKFM, duly noted/confirmed on my list each time and did not research any further for reasons I can only ascribe to the non-existence of free will (just roll with it, Sartre).

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One eternity later, still listening to DKFM, I find myself captivated by a dreamy little song that I learn is called ‘Dizzy on the Comedown.’ I see that it is by a band called Turnover that I have obviously never heard of before, because if I had I would surely, definitely, 100% have looked into them immediately.

If you think I am lying to myself, you are correct, and have been paying attention. I appreciate this, let’s be friends, but please stay where you are. I dont think either of us enjoys meeting new people.

I turn to my trusty parchment, yellowed with age and crumbling to dust, and raise my quill – but wait! what’s this? Staring back at my myopic eyes is the name Turnover, already inscribed not once but TWICE!

Ooo, you didn’t see that coming.

It turns out that not only had my past self already made a note of ‘Diazepam’, she had also had the good sense to add ‘Humming’ to the list. Yet my idiot future/present (and now also past) self needed to be struck by ‘Dizzy on the Comedown’ before making any sort of move towards further exploration. At this point, the shoegaze universe had moved way past ‘giving a sign’ and gone straight to ‘we’re going to have to hit her with the signboard.’ (it’s super effective, btw)

Coincidentally, yet unsurprisingly, all three songs are off Turnover’s iconic album Peripheral Vision. My dawdling has meant that I’m way too late to the release party but I’ve made up for that lapse by listening to it incessantly since then.

The strength of Peripheral Vision lies in the indisputable fact that it is perfect. It is a vial of nostalgia that hasn’t aged a day since 1994 – which is impressive because it was released in 2015. Though it is never overtly implied, the throwback hangs heavy in lyrics like carelessly you pass the hours, humming songs you used to sing when you were young as well as in familiar themes of anxiety and frustration. Like the 90s, it pits impossibly cheery melodies against lyrics that are nothing short of tragic or, of course, angst-ridden.

But this isn’t your garden variety existential, adolescent angst. And why should it be? It’s 2020 and we’re no longer deluded enough to believe that ‘angst’ is a phase reserved for frustrated teenagers. If anything, the angsty kids of the 90s have grown into the still-angsty adults of the 2000s. In a world that’s progressively going to pot, ‘New Scream’ is an ode to adult ennui, to the obligation and pretense that ‘everything’s ok’ when clearly, evidently, it is not:

Can I stay at home? I don’t want to go
I don’t want to wake up till the sun is hanging low
Stay up through the night, sleep away the light
Just another dream I had that’s better than my life

Adolescent dreams gave to adult screams
Paranoid that I won’t have all the things they say I need
What if I don’t want a pattern on my lawn?
All I know is something’s wrong

‘New Scream’ is a lot more subtle than ‘Diazepam’ and ‘Dizzy on the Comedown’ when it comes to talking about mental health, but the latter two hide these bleak references behind delightfully upbeat melodies. ‘Diazepam’ has guitars twinkling over it from start to finish, but it’s someone sinking into depression and worrying about how much of an emotional burden they are to their partner who they’re convinced will eventually have had enough and leave.

It was always a dream just to know you
Sometimes I find I can hardly speak your name
I know one day I’ll come home and I’ll find you
It’s just a matter of time till you break from the strain

‘Diazapam’ finds a mirror in ‘Dizzy on the Comedown’ . You’d be forgiven if, even by the twentieth listen, you hear nothing on ‘Dizzy…’ but the innocent euphoria of young love. But listen a little closer and you’ll realise something’s been off from the very beginning:

Up and down like a red rubber ball,
You’re always back and forth like a clock on the wall
…
If I stay do you think you could change your routine?
I know a trick I’ve always got a few up my sleeve

And right to the chorus

Won’t you come here and spin with me?
I’ve been dying to get you dizzy.
Find a way up into your head,
So I can make you feel like new again.

But it’s still a charmer. It’s a reversal of the dynamic on ‘Diazepam’, with our protagonist doing all he can to support his partner’s moods and insecurities, and it’s only with this reading that we realise that this isn’t quite the naive infatuation initially perceived, but a sturdier, almost desperate, kind of love.

There’s a sketch in an old MAD magazine from back when it turned out quality content that pins 23 as the age when you hear of an artist on MTV and go ‘who?’. I don’t have to explain this but I will – the joke is that by the time you hit the ripe old age of 23, you’re no longer cool enough to be in on the music scene. It also (unintentionally?) implies that there comes a time what’s when you’re no longer the target audience for mainstream media houses.

It’s likely that, had the internet not shown up, us 90s kids would have nothing but our withering, overplayed CDs (and DVD-Rs burned to a crisp) to turn to for a hit of nostalgia. But the internet did show up – and conveniently enough, it did so IN the 90s. And so, while the erstwhile 90s kids aka millenials, may not be the target audience of mainstream music programming today, some of them are taking the sounds they grew up with and reinventing them for the 21st century. Some others are writing words of praise to these revivalists on Pitchfork or Aglet Eaters (an unfair comparison, as P4K comes nowhere close to the superior quality content you find on AE). And everyone else is mesmerised by our absolutely objective, unbiased and 100% correct opinion and is buying Peripheral Vision on Bandcamp.

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Discover Feature

30 songs that blew my mind (that you probably haven’t heard of) – Part 5

FUN FACT: The original deadline for this series was December 2017. It’s harder than it looks.

21. The Nasty Side – The Reegs: Sometimes you come across a track on a mixtape (aka Mediafire link, ‘sup 2010!) composed of nothing but obscurities and you find yourself deliberating the eternal question: ‘How does no one else know this???’

The situation only becomes more baffling when you consider that this particular obscurity was born from the ashes (shreds, rather) of a band known and loved by everyone, without exception – The Chameleons. The Reegs is that band and ‘The Nasty Side’ is proof that we live in a paradoxical parallel universe where sublimity wanders, alone and unheard, into oblivion. I’m just grateful it stopped to pay me a visit.

22. As I Walk Away – Yuck: Yuck is my shoegaze equivalent of casual gaming – I enjoy them immensely but I listen to them absent-mindedly, letting album after album flow over me without taking the time out to stop and identify individual tracks. 

Then I heard ‘As I Walk Away’ and was convinced that Winamp (!) was done with the album and had skipped over to an unheard treasure in my music library. I was wrong. On this fateful day, I realised that Yuck was not a single band, but a portal to a sonic multiverse – or a biverse at the very least. I could listen to ‘As I Walk Away’ indefinitely and it would still stop me in my tracks every time.

23. Destinos – Have A Nice Life: I confess, I am not an OG Have A Nice Life fan because my first taste of the group was Voids – the informally released collection of demos and unreleased tracks from their magnum opus Deathconsciousness.

I have no recollection of what I knew of HANL or even life itself before I heard ‘Destinos’ – a track so strong, so vivid, you can see it, feel its weight throbbing in your chest. ‘Destinos’ is the last track on Voids and has no counterpart on Deathconsciousness, which makes perfect sense given that the track – dark, heavy and soaked in a meaning none of us can comprehend – is an album all by itself: a palate cleanser at the end of Voids, overpowering any memories of what you heard before and leaving you with echoes of itself.

24. Maggie Says I Love You – No Joy: We don’t really have the kind of summer here in New Delhi that this song evokes. It’s undeniably geographic. I can tell you right off that it sounds like a California summer; despite the harsh realities of: 1) never having been and having no desire to go to California; 2) knowing a summer more akin to the fires of hell than the mellow haze ‘Maggie Says… ‘makes me imagine. Still, I maintain this to be an accurate description of the track in question, even in the face of the harshest reality of them all: 3) No Joy are Canadian.

25. Sunbeam –  A Place To Bury Strangers: I used to listen to this track in the park in the evening on my way home from work. I’d take a break between trams to escape the peak hour rush and the crowds it brings, to sit under a tree with ‘Sunbeam’ watching time crawling over us.


Read also: A Place To Bury Strangers – Sunbeam (2007)

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Discover

Don’t wait for me

Hello, hi – I see you are perplexed by the relative silence on the blog over the past few (many?) months BUT what if I told you this silence is JUST AN ILLUSION as is the date on this blog post, because I am in fact living in March 2018, not March 2019 as you have so falsely assumed, and so are you  (you just don’t know it yet).

Forget March 2018, I’m living in 1994 for the rest of my life via Chrome Neon Jesus, the album that I haven’t yet turned off loop. My partner whose primary language is NOT english is now fluent and also contaminated as he cannot stop himself from shrieking along  the lyrics with me, so thank you Teenage Wrist for the language course, highly recommended to all non-native English speakers and available at the low, low price of 8 USD (booster pack expected to come along later this year).

Yeah I haven’t listened to an album so diligently on repeat since I was 15, and rightly so because that is the recommended listening format. Back when they made CDs you could read this rule in the fine print under the technical info that nobody read and that’s why you didn’t already know this.

One minor side effect that I have discovered, however, is the corresponding urge to listen to Swervedriver who I now realise I didn’t really appreciate until Teenage Wrist came along, so maybe share the royalties from Duel around?

I have not yet got around to scratching the Swervedriver itch. I’ll consider it in another 25 years when I arrive in 2019. Don’t tell me what happens though.

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Discover Feature

30 Songs That Blew My Mind (that you probably haven’t heard of) – Part 4

The posts are getting farther apart as I struggle to select that final 50%.

16. Bashling – Emperor X: My Emperor X story is a weird one and it starts with me meeting the man before the music. My friend, who worked at a community radio station at the time, was the obsessive fan and by the end of our adventure I had morphed into one as well. We were at the studio for an interview and in came a request for E-X to perform. Problem: we have no instruments on hand. The show goes into break as the four of us are scurry around this tiny room, tapping on floors, walls and furniture, looking for anything that could provide a beat. ‘Something hollow!’ – Chad Matheny/E-X specifies. I stumble upon a hollow panel in the wall and E-X smashes into it bare-handed. That afternoon in a tiny studio on the 9th floor of an old building in the Melbourne CBD, I watched the most beautiful, raw and honest live performance in the world.

The sheer emotion and heart and passion and love in E-X’s music hits you like a steel beam you can almost taste and, of the lot, its ‘Bashling’ that wrapped itself around my stony little heart. An oddity in the E-X catalogue, it speaks to me the loudest (or hits the hardest). Watch him perform this lonely, loveless song under a bridge in Glendale and you’ll understand why I’ve never known a performer more compelling.

17. Bayshore – Bleach Dream: We just met a few months ago and if it hadn’t been for DKFM, this album would have drifted right by leaving me none the wiser as it has nearly the entire shoegaze community because how else can you explain its absence from every best of list from 2017? It’s my own stupid and nearly criminal fault that I didn’t catch the aptly named Saudade sooner because it would have topped mine.

It feels almost wrong to have such a young track on this list, but the more I listen to ‘Bayshore’ and its reprise, ‘I Love You,’ the more I am convinced that it belongs here. It tastes of summer sunsets and teenage love. It’s charmingly simple but you’ll feel your heart drop they the way it would when you caught a glimpse of your inexplicable teenage crush, skipping a beat like it did when you received a text message you knew was from them on your 3310. If I miss out on making an end of year list for 2018, it’ll be because I was listening to ‘Bayshore’ all year long.

18. According to Plan – I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness: Why do love songs have to be sad to be beautiful? How can there be so much devastation in so few words? How can six strings sound so soul-crushingly plaintive, yet so stoic, yet so hopeful all at the same time? I had to turn to the stories of gods to explain all that ‘According to Plan’ is and all that it can be and even the most epic of sagas couldn’t capture what you feel when you hear ‘In a perfect world / the perfect place is with you / the truth is the world is without love.‘

19. Solera la Reina – Amusement Parks on Fire: One of only two bands in the world that can do no wrong (the other is No. 20 on this list). Find me a weak APOF track and I’ll… I guess we’re not friends any more then?

‘Solera La Reina’ is peak APOF – six minutes of perfection tucked away on an unassuming EP which is sort of analogous to how tucked away APOF were themselves at the time. I’ve struggled to find what I can say about this track beyond: it is beautiful. Not beautiful like a tableau is beautiful, but something more profound. It’s something to take your breath away and bring tears to your eyes and leave your hands trembling. Out of everything flawless that APOF have ever created, Solera La Reina is far and away the queen.

20. Freddie and the Trojan Horse – The Radio Dept.: Do you remember the feeling you’d get when a song you loved came on the radio or on TV and you’d will every cell in your body to full alertness so you could give it your undivided attention, soak every note, take in every vibration, and commit it to memory hoping to be able to play back in your head once it was over because you weren’t sure when you’d hear it again? You’d concentrate so furiously on that one song that by the end of it you’d feel like you hadn’t really listened to it at all. Do you remember that pure, childlike (because we were children) all-consuming love and obsession for just one track? ‘Freddie and the Trojan Horse’ is that feeling and when it plays you can’t imagine how a song more perfect could ever exist.

Categories
Feature

Mixing it up with Andrew Saks of FLDPLN

You’ll remember Andrew Saks from Sway and the seminal track ‘Fall.’ which came out way back in 2003 and remains a cult shoegaze classic to this day.

Andrew aka ASAKS is defined by his experiments with audio. As Sway he didn’t hesitate a moment as he moved from classic shoegaze on The Millia Pink and Green, to game-changing bleepy-bloops on This Was Tomorrow. If there’s anything that defines his music, it’s that it has remained undefinable for a decade and a half.

Today, Andrew is FLDPLN and he’s just put out his first album, Let You Down. In this interview, He’s going to tell us about his evolution from Sway to FLDPLN, how he conquered uncharted territory (again – this time it’s hip-hop), and if we’ll ever see him shapeshift back to the Sway we once knew.

AE: OMG you’ve lost your vowels! What is FLDPLN?

ASAKS: Ha! FLDPLN is vowel-free for “field-plan”, which is derived from my other life/day job where I’m a utility a designer or planner. I thought it would be kind of a funny way of branding my music –  a weird way of bridging dimensions. The day job is such a big part of my life, and it really keeps me from doing as much music as I should be or would like to, but I can’t escape it.

I know it’s my job, but I’m having trouble defining your sound. Could you do it for me?

I’m not really sure what to call it or how to define it either. I guess it’s primarily electronic music with maybe some lo-fi hip hop? I sort of look at it like sound collage. The other night I was trying to think of a food that would be metaphor for the sound of what I’m doing. The best I could come up with was some sort of parfait, but then I thought of Halo-Halo, a Filipino dessert. It’s like a big cup of shaved ice, some cheese ice cream, prune or taro ice cream, condensed milk, coconut, gummy candies, sweet corn, dried fruit, mochi… and pretty much anything else that’s sweet. It looks like a parfait when you get it, then you mash the hell out of it and mix it all up. It’s amazing – all these layers and textures mushed together. FLDPLN is kind of like that. A couple of hip-hop guys told me my stuff was ‘chill’. So… noisy chill-hop?

Talk me through the evolution from The Millia Pink and Green > This Was Tomorrow > Let You Down and why you felt you needed a new identity for the last one.

With The Millia Pink and Green I was still very much enamored with huge, dramatic guitars and swirly Robin Guthrie-ness. I just wanted to make music that was like windy+carl but with really melodic bits to it. I loved Slowdive, and at that time (maybe like 2000-2003) I felt like that whole shoegaze thing was so dead that the handful (or so it seemed at the time) of bands doing it were unique in a sense that we were holding on to these sounds when so many other bands were going very snappy, pop-punk and all that. Or like rap-metal shit. I wanted to do something that reflected what I liked and made me feel nostalgic.

In about 2004 or 2005 I had a couple of friends that were messing with electronic stuff, like Fruity Loops (pre-audio FL) and they got me into it. I got into Ableton Live, which is THE greatest instrument/audio workstation ever made. This Was Tomorrow as Sway and the ASAKS singles I did for Saint Marie Records compilations were meant to be a bridge between the shoegaze stuff and my love of electronic stuff.

I was always fond of 80’s pop stuff, even some of the cringe-worthy, sugary sweet stuff. I’m also a die-hard old-school video game nerd, so I love chiptunes sounds. I’m a decent guitar player, but for some reason the whole guitar thing annoys me a lot. How many pedals do you have? What kind of pedals do you use? What guitar? I feel so ordinary as a guitar player – it just bores me. With electronic music and synthesis, I feel like there’s this whole endless universe of sounds that one can create. When you start smashing sounds together, it’s kind of like the whole shoegaze/noise thing but using digital tools. I’m completely captivated by the possibilities. FLDPLN is going to be my outlet for the things I’ve been experimenting with on my own since 2006 or so. My Northern Two album with Seth from Sway was kind of a beginning to this I suppose.

I think many of us loyal Sway fans saw something along these lines coming our way since This Was Tomorrow. But I have to admit, the hip-hop component is a welcome surprise. What’s the story behind that?

I was really hoping NOT to lose the Sway fans with this. I feel like shoegaze/dreampop fans have the potential to be really open-minded about mixing sounds and stuff, so I’d hoped I really wouldn’t alienate anyone that’s been following Sway for so long. Since I was a kid, I’ve always loved rap music. I kind of have a love/hate relationship with the genre these days. There’s a lot of really cool, more underground stuff out there. You know like more indie rap than the big, over played shit you hear on hip hop radio. A lot of that stuff annoys me because of the really basic, crank-it-out production and over the top misogynist lyrics. I’m an art guy, so I won’t fault peeps for making their art, just some of it’s not for me. I love the artists featured on the Let You Down and picked them out because of their varied and unique sounds. The idea of featuring some hip hop artists came from one of the first times I did a little street performance/busking deal, just out making my beats when I had a few dudes with their crew come by and start freestyling over my shit. It was kind of a ”um, yeah… that kind of sounds legit!” moment. I’m excited about the potential to do more production for others.

Do you think you’ll ever go back to your shoegaze roots and one day we might hear another ‘Fall’?

Hmmm. I dunno. I feel like that’s kind of flown, as far as the guitars thing. MBV is back. Slowdive is back. Ride is back. I feel like the time for homage is over. There’s ways I can make music and sounds I can explore that don’t necessarily have to step in on that territory. I will always have those sounds and the Sway sound as part of my production, so you will absolutely hear more huge swirly textures. The next FLDPLN release will feature some downright ambient stuff, but it will be mostly synth stuff. I love dramatic soundscapes. It’ll be in the mix.

I know I’m not the only one to think this but we’re all happy to have you back on the scene. What’s been keeping you busy since This Was Tomorrow?

My day job. I’ve been desperately trying to tough it out and make music for years but it’s been slow going, and I’m a very harsh critic when it comes to my own stuff. The FLDPLN album is actually the second album I’ve done since then. The first one started out very This Was Tomorrow-ish. I put it on ice. I started doing a lot more field recording stuff and sampling and stuff and that led to what you have with the Let You Down. I also used a lot of sounds that I made on my phone using music apps and stuff. If you listen really close, and I hope some folks will, you’ll even hear some Sway samples from The Millia Pink and Green in there. I sampled my own stuff! I’ve just been plugging away. Last year, I got a new position at work (field planner) and I now work closer to home and have more time to make music so there will be more on the way. I already have a rough framework for the next FLDPLN release, which will probably be an EP.

Tell me about what inspired the music and the songwriting on Let You Down.

Like most of the stuff I do, nostalgia is the main driver. I love mid-century modernism and while it’s become super hip over the last ten years or so, I still really notice the beauty in things that were once supposed to be part of the future, and were so contemporary at the time, but have been abandoned and neglected. I’m really influenced by architecture (a field I wish I would have studied professionally) and print art.

I absolutely love 50’s and 60’s jazz. I love Expressionist art and things that experiment with texture. Street art gets me going. I’m just very interested in making very textural, layered but not necessarily chaotic music. I like fuzzy, broken sounds. For the past five or so years now, a lot of what I’ve done is experimenting either in my home or out busking. I’ll improvise using synths and collected samples and just make a mess. These sessions usually have their golden moments, so with Let You Down I tried to do an album that sort of captures that feeling. It’ll be an ongoing challenge. The improvisational spirit is a focus with this project. I love the accessibility of electronic music, and the potential for textural experimentation. Making sonic collage really makes me happy. I just hope people enjoy listening to it!

Perhaps it’s too early to ask this question, but what’s next for FLDPLN?

I’m going to be working on a follow-up EP with about 5-6 songs that I hope to release by the end of 2018. It’ll be a similar vibe, but there’s definitely going to be some very ambient stuff in there. I do love my ethereal stuff, so I have some pieces that I’ve already put together with some really pretty stuff. I’m not sure if the next release will feature any guest artists yet, but I’m open to it. I’ve already discussed with a couple of different peeps. We’ll see. For now, I’m looking forward to playing versions of the tunes on Let You Down out at some shows and just enjoying having something new out!

Let You Down released on 23 March, 2018 and can be bought here.