You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Tracks 11-15 are here:
11. Distressor EP – Whirr: This isn’t a track, but I’m making an exception for one of the most significant releases of my lifetime. I used to listen to Distressor every day on my 1.5 hour commute home from work back in 2010. It ‘spoke’ to me, for no discernible reason. If you ask me today, I could swear that every year since 2010 was composed solely of Whirr (who I called ‘Whirl‘ till the bitter end). One day we must have fused into one because five years later I saw my life play out to Distressor, and this time when it spoke to me I understood what it said.
See also: Stay With Me
12. Skies You Climb – Highspire: If Distressor plays out my life, ‘Skies You Climb’ is my persistence beyond life. One day I will no longer exist but ‘Skies You Climb’ will remain and with it so will I. It’s my ashes in the air, my ‘soul’ liberated, my atoms clinging to vapour and coalescing wherever the song goes. If you’re listening to this in 2100, say hi to that dust cloud in the room.
See also: Persistence
13. The Soft Attack – the Daysleepers: It feels like you’re flying but recently I’ve come to figure it’s actually about dying. The sound of seagulls and crashing waves, memories of the sea, being dragged down and a cold snap give ‘The Soft Attack’ a more insidious meaning than the one I had originally interpreted. At the time, ‘The Soft Attack’ sounded like freedom. Even today, I hear it and I don’t see death. ‘The colours in my head‘ and ‘watching the seabirds dive‘ sound, to me, transcendent. There’s not a note of despair or despondency on this song. Whatever the intended meaning, it sounds to me like a passage to paradise. I can’t speak for what The Daysleepers wanted but we can make what we want of ‘The Soft Attack’ and boundless freedom is what I’ve always heard.
14. Hey – Blind Mr. Jones: To this day I fail to understand how a community as tightly knit as the shoegazers could let a band like Blind Mr. Jones slip into oblivion. My own attempts to locate them – if only just to say thank you – have failed.
I first heard ‘Hey’ back in my Shoegaze 101 days and I still struggle to find a fault with the track beyond its unsatisfying fade-out. How I lap up every note and how I used to – and still do – delight in spitting out the final, disdainful verse: ‘Oh it’s another mess of a day/I’m lifeless and I’m sick and tired of what you’ve got to say/Oh it’s another waste of a day/I’m listless and I’m so, so bored of what you’ve got to say.‘ The lines were an anthem when I first heard them and they still stir up the same warm, fuzzy misanthropy.
15. Achilles’ Heel – Toploader: I tracked down ‘Achilles’ Heel’ two years after I first met it. In a rare moment of taste, the television threw it at me late one weeknight and left me transfixed. I was positive it was a programming error and that, surely, they meant to play twee people-pleaser ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’. I was probably right because that was the last time I saw it on TV. It was only a year or two later, with nothing but the melody that had been echoing in my head and a new, blazing 56 kbps internet connection, that I found it again. I call it a chance weeknight, but was that moment really a coincidence or were we always meant to find each other?