Category: Album

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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.

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Album Feature Rediscover

Find Your Way Home: Looking back at K with Crispian Mills

This year, Kula Shaker release K 2.0 – a companion to their seminal debut, K, released in September 1996. At the time of this interview, I’m huddled in a quiet corner of a restaurant in New Delhi and I’m asking the Kula Shaker frontman to walk me through the story of K with 7000 kilometres between us.

I start by asking him to tell me about what it was like to release K twenty years ago. He makes an unconventional Blake reference, referring to Songs Of Innocence And Experience – a book he describes as “one of the great classics of literature.” In it, Blake walks the reader through the joys and perils of youthful naïveté.

“What does that have to do with K?” I ask.

“Innocence. We thought we were smarter than we were. We were speaking to these veterans of the music business and getting ripped off. You tell yourself: ‘It won’t happen to me.’ You’re young. But we were walking right into the lion’s den. A nest of snakes. That was the innocence of our youth ploughing into the adult world.”

He continues, his memory of the spirit of the album as vivid as if it was released yesterday. “And it’s an innocent album. It’s an album that’s asking questions, struggling with identity. It’s an album that’s looking for answers.”

K was – and still is – a landmark album. It reached me through Indian cable television the year it was released, but it wasn’t until many years after that I learned that its reception in its home country was… mixed. I ask Mills what he feels the reason behind its criticism was.

“The musical styles on K are mainstream now. People didn’t know how to understand it or where to place it when it was released, so all that was left to do was deride it. Before K, ‘Indian music’ was the music that played in the background when you were in an Indian restaurant. Before K, Krishna was an image on kitschy poster. It really changed us. More than acid, it was hearing about Krishna and going to India that changed us. Krishna is the unavoidable, inevitable karmic destiny. The crooked, unpredictable, divine lover. It’s very personal. And K is based on very personal beliefs.”

Indian influences aside, K was born in the belly of Britpop and, while that could have worked against it, the album managed to turn the era to its advantage.

“Britpop was very much about being British. Bands really embraced and got off on that ‘We’re British!’ sensibility. We weren’t saying we were Indian or that we were British; there’s a more universal identity on K. Theresa May said something like ‘A citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere’. People are sceptical that there’s a world out there without flags. We said that and people wanted to kill us. People are afraid of the concept of no flags.”

“When I was in private schools, they called me ‘common’, and when I was in state schools they called me ‘posh’. It’s made me very cynical about all these labels. Kula Shaker was born cynical, idealistic, and true. It’s born in ancient traditions, the universality of sanatana dharma, jivan dharma, the identity of the soul. We have a lot of people against us who don’t understand what we’re about. I call it an ‘Accident of Chronology’; it was a moment that suited us. Its 60s obsessed, golden age of pop and rock aesthetic fitted quite well with our own.”

Regardless of how neatly it fitted the Britpop mould, K was something else. A band of four Brits turning Hindu mantras into 60s infused pop melodies was bound to stand out.

“We didn’t make an effort to be different. We were different. We were learning music – I was learning sarod – and we were working with Himagsu Goswami, who was living in London, and his niece, Gouri, who sang on all the albums. A lot of our sound developed from playing unconventional gigs; we played squats, we played festivals – it wasn’t just pubs and clubs. We weren’t listening to the radio and saying: ‘Let’s sound like them.’ We felt this was our destiny.”

The innocence and positivity on K lies in stark contrast to its cynical successor Peasants, Pigs And Astronauts – an album whose dystopian lyrics are just as applicable today as they were in 1999. I can’t resist pointing out the dichotomy.

“Peasants, Pigs And Astronauts is the apocalypse and the aftermath. It’s us having fun with the idea of the millennium,” he tells me. “There was angst in K. But it bore fruit in Peasants, Pigs And Astronauts.”

Kula Shaker never really revisited their sound on K. Their style changed across each successive album, seemingly moving away from the band’s original aesthetic. I ask if there’s any chance we can expect a return to their roots in the future. The closest we’ll get, I learned, is the release of their first live album.

“It’s something we’ve struggled with in the past. We’ve struggled to bottle the magic and excitement of a live show in a recording. So we booked a studio in East London and played a show to a few hundred people. This was in May this year. The sound and the atmosphere were great. The album’s going to be called Live In The East (End).”

I ask, and he lets me in on a secret around K’s recording. “We weren’t crazy about how the album was sounding, originally. We originally recorded it with John Leckie. We were huge fans of his work, but we weren’t huge fans of the outcome when we first heard K; we were disappointed. Our manager told us to stop being such perfectionists. We’d recorded a version of ‘Shower Your Love’ that they wanted to release. No one’s heard it yet.”

“We had to record the B-sides in a small studio. ‘Drop In The Sea’, ‘Dance In Your Shadow’ – that’s where we recorded them. Stephen Harris was at the recording session and we ended up taking a lot of the Leckie tracks off the record.”

A lot has changed in twenty years, and if the music industry was a lions’ den/snake pit then, would K have survived today?

“The music business, and the way it works, used to be much more focused. Not only was it signing bands but it was also simpler to navigate in terms of the ways you could promote a band. But now you have this ocean of content – the Internet – that everyone is drowning in. It’s difficult for music to get through. And whatever does get through has a vanilla taste to it. So I think K would struggle, but you never know. K didn’t fit with Britpop either.”

“As for downloading music – it works, it’s easy. But just because something is easy doesn’t mean it’s right. It’s just as difficult for a band today to make it and there’s so much less support from record companies. Musicians have to be part-time, and there’s a huge sacrifice to be made if you have to live that life. Not many people can tour like that. You have to be a bit mad and very clever to make it.”

I’ve caught Mills just ahead of Kula Shaker’s tour of Japan and the UK. “K is an album that was designed to be heard in one go,” he tells me. “When we’re on tour in Japan and the UK, we’re going to be playing it in its entirety.” He doesn’t see me nod and plan my trip to London. I ask him how the shows are doing, and to tell me about the people who come see them play.

“Our fans are pretty devoted, and I’m always amazed. We did a concert in LA – we hadn’t played there in 15 years, so we didn’t know if anyone would remember us. But they were such exciting shows – we’re so grateful to have those fans. We’re very grateful for the people who’ve stuck with us – the kids, now maybe their kids. The band certainly means something to the fans.”

At 9 years old, when I first heard K, I thought it was beautiful. At 29, it’s still beautiful. I’m not yet tired of the chaotically spiralling guitars on ‘Tattva’, and ‘Govinda’ still manages to soothe me at my most savage. The strings that open ‘Hollow Man (Part 2)’ are exquisite enough to have generously ‘inspired’ Radiohead (cough ‘Faust Arp’ cough), while ‘Start All Over’ is as sweetly romantic today as it was then. And then there’s ‘303’, whose whirlwind cityscapes and unrestrained recklessness can still melt my cold, dead heart.

Originally published on Drowned in Sound.

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Album Feature Review

Echodrone – Five

“This one is different.”

I don’t know what my Echodrone SPOC, Eugene Suh, was on about when he introduced Five to me with those words, helpfully hooking me up with a download of the album a month before its official release.

(I realise I’m writing this two months AFTER the official release)

The announcement that Echodrone were coming out with a new album had been the highlight of my new year, but now I watched my download of Five near completion with increasing apprehension as E’s words reverberated in my skull forcing me to confront the awful possibility…

What if it sounds nothing like them?

I’d last listened to Echodrone when they released their marvelous album of cover songs, Mixtape for Duckie, in 2013. Their version of ‘Cry Little Sister’ is still my go-to mantra whenever I’m beset by rage, angst, or any emotion at all. In these moments, it’s Meredith’s voice that I need to say to me “Thou shalt not kill.”

But that version of Echodrone no longer exists. Original drummer, Mark Tarlton, and vocalist, Meredith Gibbons, have since moved on, and their absence is probably behind Eugene’s conviction that this version of Echodrone is nothing like the last. On Five we meet Mike Funk, Jim Hrabak and Rachel Lopez.

“We found Jim through his solo project, Slack Armada,” says Eugene. “he’s really added an electronic element that we were striving to achieve on previous albums.”

He goes on: “Rachel added a new set of vocal and vocal harmony ideas. She’s very much influenced by Siouxsie and the Banshees. And Mike’s drumming is just so solid – he really shaped the rhythmic backbone of Five.”

I can’t narrate the romantic trepidation with which I pulled the shrink wrap off before gingerly placing it into my hi-fidelity system and pressing play, because the only thing remotely retro about the entire experience was Winamp.

An hour later, I was typing out my response to Eugene. “Don’t take this the wrong way…” I found myself saying, “but Five sounds exactly like an Echodrone album.”

Someone more keen on picking a fight may have pulled me up for accusing them of unoriginality. Eugene, however, was stoked! “I’m blown away,” he said, “Honestly, it’s an extremely difficult genre to work in. Many shoegaze bands seem to want to rehash the past, and many fans want their favourite shoegaze bands to rehash the past. We always hope that our music comes across as a unique entry in the shoegaze arena.”

Uniqueness is all well and good, but there’s not much that emerges from a vacuum, so you have to wonder: what influences have to be fused together to create that uniquely Echodroney sound?

“It’s funny – we always start an idea based on an influence. ‘Disparate Numbers’ used to be called ‘Boards of Canada’, ‘Glacial Place’ used to be called ‘I Paddy’ cause I found a cool arpeggiator program on my iPad and built the song around it. ‘Less Than Imaginary’ used to be called ‘Vampire Weekendy’ (?!?!?!)). But I think we end up throwing all our influences into a melting pot and it always ends up sounding like Echodrone!”

Not one to ask a question without an ulterior motive I gently steer the conversation towards the more than passing resemblance I find ‘NoiseBed’ bears to a somewhat popular MBV track.

Here’s how you ask a subtle question:

So, um, did you ever listen to Andy Weatherall‘s remix of ‘Soon’?

It’s Mike Funk who responds: “I love that Andy Weatherall remix! It’s so hypnotic and groovy. Even Kevin Shields got caught up in the rave culture of the early 90s. He had that one famous quote back then: ‘The only innovation in music is in house music and rap music.’ ‘Soon’ definitely reflects that. Andy’s production is so distinct that you can’t imagine hearing classic tracks by Primal Scream and Happy Mondays heard in any other way.

“I have a funny story about playing the ‘Soon’ remix as a college radio DJ – a fellow DJ walked into the station MCR while I was on the air and spinning that 12″ single and he said, ‘Your record’s skipping.’ It wasn’t, of course, but that’s what’s great about ‘Soon’- it’s so strong in its rhythm and repetition that it’s almost euphoric but still loud and heavy.”

My cunning plan has fallen flat. I am left with no choice but to resort to open and honest dialogue. I mention the similarity between the two tracks and:

“Never even connected the two songs before, but I can hear what you’re talking about with the Soon remix! Jim was targeting a Fuck Buttons vibe with all his electronics…’Soon’ didn’t even cross our minds!”

I swear I’m not imagining it:

Moving on. I wonder about ‘Disparate Numbers’ – the synth-loaded opener with a vibe so electro, it could easily pull off being my age.

“‘Disparate Numbers’ is our first political-type song. It’s about how government and economic policies have created this huge, ever-expanding divide between the rich and the poor.  We continue to let our governments and federal reserve representatives run free, implementing policies that extract money from the poor and provide risk-free capital to the rich (their friends).  In essence, we end up ‘swinging lower, orbiting slower’ until we exist in a completely separate reality from the upper-class.

“I remember being really affected by the photos of Hong Kong’s underground city.  Within a few city blocks, you have high rise luxury apartments filled with the city’s wealthy elite (Rurik Jutting is a perfect example of that excess lifestyle) and right underneath all that wealth and excess, you have some of the poorest people living a completely different life. So the people inhabiting the underground city and the people inhabiting the high-rise apartments – they are essentially disparate numbers, completely separated by an accumulation of wealth that’s really only a series of electronic ones and zeros. Just electronic numbers in a bank account.”

It’s fan favourite ‘Octopussy’ that steals the show on Five, though, proving (again) that Echodrone know just what to do with a cover. As a band, they’ve always been capable of exhibiting a muted magnificence – a superpower they do not reveal as frequently as I’d like. The last time they let the immensity of their sound shine through was on their crushing rendition of ‘Cry Little Sister’ on Mixtape for Duckie before which they could have knocked the breath out of a sizeable percentage of the world’s population with ‘Under an Impressive Sky’ and a good sound system.

‘Octopussy’ is undoubtedly the gloriousest track on Five. It makes you wonder – does having a set format make Echodrone bolder? Looking at Mixtape for Duckie and Five, I’d hazard a ‘yes’, but this is the band that made the sonic trump card ‘Under an Impressive Sky.’ What could possibly stop them from doing it again?

See for yourself… Pick up Five from Saint Marie Records.

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Album Rediscover

Messy days and crosswords: Tatooine Returns

Let’s be clear.

‘Hey’ is the greatest shoegaze track to emerge out of the 90s.

I would listen to ‘Hey’ before I listened to ‘Soon’ or ‘Alison’ or ‘Pearl’ or ‘Black Metallic.’

And Blind Mr. Jones are only the most exotic group to ever walk the earth.

Because Blind Mr. Jones are the only the only group I have ever known to have a flautist as a band member.

Yet no one has a damn clue where they got to.

How many flautists could there possibly be in Marlow?

(filling in crosswords on park benches)

——

Shoegaze community, you have let me down.

Your tenacity is a delusion. Your loyalty is an illusion.

Anyhoo, St. Marie Records are reissuing Tatooine.

I’ve only been playing nothing else for 4 days.

Hang your heads and soothe your conscience.

Maybe don’t listen to anything else for a while.

Categories
Album Rediscover

Under Heaven

Whispers assured us we were as lost and stoned as anyone else. People come and go, live and die, cities rise and fall, and change. But you – you promised you’d still be there in the morning.

And you were – you are the sound the sun rises to.

And you remain – you’re what the earth spins to.

But you don’t care about your sway over the sun or the earth or the tides.

You only care about us.

That’s why we love you.

Happy 20th Birthday, Souvlaki.

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Album Rediscover

Sweet Trip – Velocity : Design : Comfort (2003)

Album Cover

Imagine all the sounds you’ve ever known and all the sounds you think you’ll know, now break them up into a musical barcode and you’ll get a visual of what Sweet Trip might sound like. The album art definitely gives you an image of what you’re about to step into, because this band is not just musically diverse, ethnically they come from three different parts of the world and have managed to create this giant super sundae of shoegazey guitars, electro-break beats, insane sound samples and melancholic dreampop vocals.

Velocity : Design : Comfort – my first Sweet Trip record – defines their sound for me. The album is produced to perfection laying down layers of dense, thin, chunky liquid and presenting it in a flawless manner for your ears to delve into making sure the contrasts fill up all the sound cravings in your head and reach that perfect point of balance.

The opener track ‘Tekka’ is in a way an overture of the madness that lies in the rest of the record, taking you on a trip from a wall of beats and crisp sound samples to a lo-fi, 8 bit screech stop and then driving you back into the buzz of little flurries and beat washes. Another track to watch out for is ‘Fruitcake and Cookies’ which expands on the notion set by the opening track, giving you more of the beat driven madness with Valerie Reyes’ vocals providing you with a rope to hold on to as you make your way through the density laid down by front man Roberto Burgos and his machines.

The track that got me hooked was ‘To All the Dancers of the World, A Round Form of Fantasy.’ It’s all your nostalgia and hope crammed into one track. The way the syncopated beat structure keeps your head bobbing in a state of disbelief at a steady tempo is unlike any song I’ve ever heard. And just when you thought things were going all lazy calm and lo-fi, you’re introduced to the sweetest wall of noise and you cant help but sink into it. Progressive is an understatement, it’s almost bipolar.

Sweet Trip has taken the best of all of the indie world and made it their sound, don’t be surprised if you’re putting five stars on each track in the record. This will be a hook you don’t wanna get out from. Sweet trip? More like sweet submission.