Aglet Eaters
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.
That’s why we love you.
Happy 20th Birthday, Souvlaki.
There are songs for seasons and songs for moods. Something like this tastes of summer. Something like this is for the cold. This is fury. This is solitude.
No Joy‘s ‘Maggie Says I Love You’ is everything.
It’s bare toes and outstretched arms in summer, it’s a glimpse of the sun in winter, it’s the rationale that overcomes fury, it is the quiet company you seek in solitude.
I don’t speak the language of lyrics.
It’s one of the traits I am least proud of because a heady melody can lead me to ignore a compelling story.
But if there really is a craft to the words, a song will bring me back. Maybe not right that minute. Maybe not even that year. But one day I’ll hear it playing in the back of my mind, and I’ll turn it on to appease the earworm. And the hungry creature will ask for more. And I’ll keep feeding it until finally, a rusty little cog in my brain will shudder awake and the worm will vanish, knowing it’s done its job.
So here – two years after seeing Wild Beasts on stage and three following the release of Two Dancers – I find the title track looping incessantly around my mind. I liked it, on first listen, but it hadn’t really got me by the throat. If anything, it was ‘The Song Before ‘Two Dancers II”
Funny that, because right now I can’t even bring to mind what the second one sounds like.
I’ve had it happen before. Innocuous songs come to me in shreds. ‘They dragged me by my ankles through the street’ hadn’t left me since the first listen. Neither had ‘They passed me round them like a piece of meat’. But now ‘I feel as if I’ve been where you have been’ was echoing off the walls of my skull, fading out and starting over, prancing around with unknown intent. What could it possibly want?
I turned it on.
‘His hairy hands/His falling fists
His dancing cock/Down by his knees’
Why don’t I listen?
Now the ankles were more apparent. So far, they had been a pair of blurry wrists in my inattentive mind. So was the desolate acceptance of ‘I’ve seen my children turn away from me’ – if that voice had eyes, they would be lowered and unfocussed. And then there’s that lie of a line:
‘Oh do you want my bones between your teeth’
The fraud – it’s the one that led me astray in the first place. You can’t help registering it because of the silence that comes before – the act so concrete, but still so intangible . Distracting. It left me mulling over it while ‘they pulled me half alive out of the sea’ washed over me. I hear the words, but because their meaning is so disparate from what I interpreted the line before to mean, I opt to gloss over them.
Still – I can hear where the name comes from. No matter how you read it or hear it, the track dances. Maybe it’s the voices – don’t think I missed ‘two hearts’ swirling behind the second verse, Hayden. It rises, and floats, and flies. The voice is heavy, as is the lump pulled out of the sea, as is the heart within it. It’s devastating but still – it’s fluid and rhythmic and as it breathes, it takes you in.
It’s a shame – I can’t listen to anything else from the album anymore.
Well duh.
I apologise if this seems like an all too obvious choice for gig of the year but, EXCUSE ME, we are talking about SPIRITUALIZED at the SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE playing LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WE ARE FLOATING IN SPACE in its ENTIRETY with THIRTY MUSICIANS including an ORCHESTRA and a TEN PIECE GOSPEL CHOIR what do you EXPECT?
“Don’t talk to me during the show!” I had warned weeks before. This was in the wake of the Primal Scream tragedy and of course, as you can tell if you’ve read the last paragraph, an even bigger deal.
Well that worked. All that happened was that they held my paw when I teared up, as I knew I would, for ‘L & G’ and for ‘Broken Heart’. The sniffles caught me off guard during ‘Cool Waves’ and ‘Stay With Me’ as well. Yes, no, it’s not surprising at all that blending a string section, a gospel choir, and a Jason Pierce, elicits emoshunz, but jeez now EVERYONE knows I am a big softie.
Lame.
For some reason, however, the lights people thought it would be a good idea to strobe it up during ‘Electricity’ and ‘Cop Shoot Cop’. I suppose the intent was to amp up the “effects” of the songs, which I appreciate, sure, but unfortunately, not only was it unnecessary, but it seemed to distract. Alors, no harm done, just a minor niggle. We don’t need to have our eyes open for ‘Electricity’ anyway.
I managed to get rid of the tearcrust (lo-fi gazebands might want that as a name) and croak my guess for the encore. Well, seeing all the strings, musicians and singers we had at our disposal, I ventured that it would likely be something off Let It Come Down.
Yup:
Lucky me!
Image nicked from FasterLouder
1. Dean and Britta playing the songs of Galaxie 500
I’m not the biggest Galaxie 500 fan, I think it’s because I don’t understand why they’re categorised as shoegaze when I can clearly make out all the lyrics. Also, Dean’s voice sounds a bit off key to me, but no one else seems to notice so I wonder if I’m just imagining it. That hasn’t stopped me from enjoying their albums, however. Except I don’t enjoy them for the reasons I enjoy shoegaze. So you see they perplex my simple mind a great deal, and as a result I feel a bit guilty, somewhat fraudulent for not appreciating them as much as I ought to. Nonetheless, Dean and Britta put on an excellent show when they played. It was the sort of gig you step out of feeling satisfied. They played the right songs, the right mix of old/new, the vocals were just right, the sound quality was perfect, and we were just the right distance from the stage. A nice, refreshing, fulfilling show.
2. Primal Scream playing Screamadelica (support: Underground Lovers)
I had been looking forward to this show for months! Underground Lovers AND Primal Scream? Talk about two dreams coming true at once! 2.5 if you make the JAMC connection, but we won’t. Unfortunately, we all know what happens when you look forward to something too much. Something goes wrong. In this case, it was a poorly timed comment after I had bounced my feet off to Underground Lovers and was buzzing with anticipation for the next. I pushed to the front so Bobby Gillespie would be able to sing to me more effectively (I don’t do this standing middle-of-the-crowd thing). “Why?” I was asked “you don’t even like them that much!”.
Fizzle.
Sigh.
It was a great gig though – everyone in top form, and the wispy Gillespie weaving some sort of spell over the audience, well aware of his charisma. It didn’t make the top owing to the rapid sap of adrenaline, but hey! I am a delicate petal, what of it? Oh you agree, do you? Well why don’t you come over here and say that, eh?
Also a buzzkill: the encore was ‘Rocks’ and the crowd that had been so shockingly listless through all of Screamadelica, exploded. Jumping up and down, pushing their way forward, stomping on my delicate petal foot. More exitement for ‘Rocks’ than ‘Loaded’?! Damn lamestreamers.
Image nicked from Faster Louder
I knew I had to go, but I was complacent – no one knows Alcest here. I’ll get tickets by-and-by.
The first show sold out.
Sheet.
Panic.
Second show announced.
It seems I had underestimated the number of attentive shoegazers in Melbourne. Needless to say, I booked my tickets at the speed of light.
I left beloved boyfriend’s birthday dinner early so I could get a spot near the front. This is the boyfriend who was going to be accompanying me to the same show, but I refused to wait for dessert (“Gaze Over Guys”, that’s my motto).
The doors opened later than they should’ve so by the time sweet-imbibing bf showed up the first band had only just started. Can I just reiterate that I gave up dessert for a band that wasn’t going to hit the stage for another two hours and can I also state that I have never sacrificed dessert for a human being in my entire life. I only do these crazy things for music. There should be an award for such heroism.
While milling about waiting for the first band to go up, I worked out why those tickets had sold out so fast. I was the lone shoegazer in a sea of metalheads. And Melbourne’s gotta lotta metalheads.
There were going to be two support acts before Alcest went up, so the show was in three stages. Each stage was marked by a smell.
The first band was a local metal group called Encircling Sea. I dug them, so I am assuming they were good. I hardly have the authority to comment, but I got into it, so did the people around me so there y’go. Unfortunately, this phase of the show smelled of Not Enough Deodorant. No fault of the chaps on stage, it was lurking somewhere within the audience.
All was saved when the second band took the stage. A local post-rock outfit called Heirs with a girl bassist. This is an important point to make because, as you might already know, girls like nice-smelling things. She placed an electric incense diffuser right at the foot of the stage where it sat quietly radiating a lovely, delicate scent as Heirs played some exceptional post-rock.Very tight, very pro, I don’t know why I hadn’t heard of them before (probably because I am not terribly cool)
But enough of that. Now it’s time for Alcest. I heard someone cry out “NEEJ!” as the band crept onstage and I did not cringe (so I get another award).
The sound was a bit shaky at first. We can’t hear you, Neige! we moaned after they’d opened with ‘Le Secret’. Neige kindly asked the sound guy to crank up his vox. What’s that… They’re maxed out? Nothing to do but shrug and carry on. Neige and crew played ‘Souvenirs’, ‘Printemps’ and ‘Iris’ off Souvenirs. From Ecailles, they played ‘Ecailles 1 & 2’ and gave me a pleasant shock when they also played ‘Solar Song’ – the song from my Least Likely List. They played a new song, and there were also one or two others in there that I can’t recall anymore. They mostly pandered to the metalheads and as the gig progressed I gradually accepted that seeing ‘Ciel Errant’ live would remain a dream as of course, the shoegazers were the less valuable faction of the audience. A justifiable situation as there are fewer of them. The crowd screamed for ‘Elevation’ as the encore which left me disappointed because – don’t get me wrong, ‘Elevation’ is a great song – it just doesn’t feel like Alcest – it doesn’t have the heart that Souvenirs does. Nonetheless, the inclusion of ‘Solar Song’ makes up for the absence of ‘Ciel Errant’ and I think of it as a little treat just for the gazers in the crowd.
This phase of the show smelled of David Jones.
Who?
If you walk down Bourke Street in Melbourne, you’ll find a department store called David Jones between Swanston and Elizabeth Streets. The perfume department looks out onto the street. I walk past it en route to my tram and whenever I do I am hit by a blast of warmed up, muddled up, designer (?) fragrances. I was taken aback when Alcest turned on and this lovely, if somewhat overpowering, scent wafted through the air. Where was it coming from, though I, turning my head left and right in desperate search of the source.
Turns out these metal kids take serious care of their hair. It was a headbanger getting his whiplash on just a row ahead of me. That’s got to be some mean conditioner.
Image Source: Robotichead (all rights reserved )
Part of the Melbourne Festival. Mono played with a 23-piece orchestra (the Holy Ground orchestra, to be precise) putting on an unsurprisingly spectacular performance. The sound was, not just enormous, but majestic. It was royalty. It was ruined by the jerks at a table over from us who mistook the gig for a social occasion, and Mono for the “live band” that plays languidly in the background while you and your friends toss your head back and laugh over a tinkling glasses of booze. The blame for the misfortune of having such individuals in the audience is twofold (not counting the people themselves). 1. The choice of venue: there are booths, the booths have tables, the tables hold drinks and the seats that wrap around the table hold people. This is v. likely to result in the illusion that the show is, in fact, a an excuse for a social outing and it is thus acceptable to yap away cheerily as the band plays on. The likely culprit for this aggravating situation is 2. the price of tickets – a mere 35 quid. How it hurts us to admit this but perhaps a higher price would have meant only those who really loved the music turned up.
But, let’s not forget, this is Mono, and they don’t need us to shoot glares at noisy fellow patrons. Mono can look after themselves. Mono know how to fill a hall, even one as expansive as the Forum, with weighty vibrations so all waggling tongues are crushed under their weight if they so much as quiver when they ought not to.
Shockingly, my own favourite aspect of the show was the between-acts music. Mono must have done the choosing because I wouldn’t expect Gorecki to be an Australian decision. Less so would I imagine anyone but the band giving Symphony No. 3 the respect due to it by playing it – all three parts of it – in its entirety, fade in to fade out. Sure, people tried to talk over this too, but Symphony #3 is sorcery which is why by the time it hit the coda, the room was stunned, struck dumb.
Thus Mono come in at #3 foiled by their own, perfect, choice of filler music.
Image Source: The AU Review
I saw my last gig of the year a couple of weeks ago. 2011 has been good for gigs. It put up an admirable fight with APTBS- and SSPU-infused 2010. I thought I’d take the time out and document my most memorable. The ones that only a few years ago, I had accepted I would never see in my life. Wa-hey, dreams come true, who knew?
Up next, a bit about my top 3 shows of 2011.
Pic of Mono’s setup from Mess & Noise
Everyone’s got to do one. I am not everyone but I am going to do one anyway. There are two ways of going about putting together a retrospective:
1, Make a lot of lists
2. Do a recap of all major events – like a neutron-star newsfeed
But then I am not a pro-blogger, I don’t necessarily keep up with news or new releases unless it is something I know I like, or expect to like or something that has been recommended to me by someone who knows what I like. See it’s all about what I like so no lists or news, just the highlights of this year in shoegaze. For me.
NB: The real reason I’m not doing lists or news is because I am too uncool to keep up well enough to form an opinion
In this edition – shoutouts to my favourite albums of the year. Disclaimer: This is not a list. I just happen to like a few albums from this year a lot. A lot a LOT. In no particular order:
Soundpool – Mirrors In Your Eyes
You’ve already seen me compose an ode to this album on here and with good reason. I love it. Soundpool sound better than ever and they have really, really come into their own here. They’ve managed to finally, finely sculpt their very own discogaze genre into a marvellous glittery, slightly blurry Studio 54 dance floor and it is marvellous. I am as enraptured with ‘Makes No Sense’ now as I was when I first heard it. Splendid.
Me You Us Them – Post-Data
Thanks to my comrade-in-arms Talha for forcing me to listen to them. You know how Kanye-fever appears to have gripped the world? Indie kids everywhere can’t tear their ears away from his album. Everyone around me – because I am surrounded by indie kids – is stumbling around in a strange Kanye trance mumbling his lyrics under their breath unable to speak of anything else. That album came out last month, did it not? Post-Data was out in April, I think, and it did the same thing to me and is STILL carrying on. I cannot get over the professionalism in conjunction with the fact that this is a debut. Every song is flawless and every song is different – the segueways and contrasts are perfect and the most jaw dropping bit is the fact that the unconventional variety (by shoegaze, or even indie rock standards – towards which this record really appears to lean) doesn’t appear to injure any of the tracks in any way. It’s even got meaningful lyrics – specifically on the unintentionally anthemic ‘Drugs’. Though it keeps changing, I think I’ve settled on ‘Loving Like Lawyers’ as my favourite track. I simply cannot say enough good things about this album and the reason I’m going on about it is because Talha’s the one who reviewed it (as he should have) (lucky thing!)
Butterfly Explosion – Lost Trails
I was a super mega excited worm about this album – having only heard ‘Chemistry’ off a shoegaze compilation and downloaded their EP I’d already classified them as one of those ‘These Guys Cannot Fail’ bands. A dangerous thing to do, but it has served me well in the past. Lost Trails did not disappoint and I maintain Butterfly Explosion are one of the most unfairly ignored (relatively speaking) bands even within gazer circles. Maybe it’s because they’re so good everyone takes their excellence for granted. Maybe it’s because they don’t appear to socialise in shoegaze circles though I do know they have an association with Soundpool up there. Whatever the case, the reason I like them so much is because they make songs that are strong – and, like caffeine, I like shoegaze to be strong without being bitter or harsh. And Butterfly Explosion nail it. They’re like the custom blend of coffee that cuts through the wet foam of expertly steamed milk when it’s placed before you in its ceramic mug so that neither overpowers the other and you’ve got a delicate, yet uniquely flavoured cup of ground-bean extract. I’ve become a bit of a caffeine fiend lately – expect analogies!
A shoutout also goes to my homies Highspire who delighted me by a) continuing to exist and b) releasing an album out of the blue. Aquatic is nothing like Your Everything lacking its predecessors pop sensibilities and well and truly living up to its name. Clearly, Highspire lean towards the sink side of the float/sink shoegaze spectrum. It was inspired by The Cove and is loaded with secrets like easter eggs – my favourite being the little note in the liner that reveals “no drum hardware was used in the making of this record” – whaaaaat.
There are other notables as well but I would rather not just randomly list them without providing a bit of a story for each. Besides, I’m hiding in my room from a forty degree day and must make myself look less like melted wax prior to heading out the door to legitimise New Year celebrations by not being home for it. New Year celebrations are always amusing – so much celebration for one motion of one hand of a clock. Humans are bizarre. Have a happy 2011!
I have never, ever been so desperate to get out of a café.
I spend hours in coffee shops, making sure my nerves don’t dare sink into complacency. They must always be on edge, the system always in fight (of fight-or-flight) mode, constantly wired, perpetually in a state of DO SOMETHING – it’s how I balance university, work, life, music (that counts as life, surely?), and half a dozen blogs all at once.
And today is a beautiful day by anyone’s standards – even a sun-loathing vampire such as myself is a fan of the delicate warmth shrouding the city today. Not blindingly bright and the air still nippy – I’d suckle on cups of coffee for an eternity if eternity was this weather.
But I didn’t today. I thought I would. But I couldn’t. I had a craving for a song I’d been listening to for two continuous hours yesterday and still hadn’t got enough of.
It’s called ‘Bashling’ and it’s by Emperor X. He’s been hopping about Australia for the past couple of weeks. I was clever enough to not say no when a friend of mine and fan of his asked me to come to one of his shows. Suffice it to say his performance left me a bit stunned.
This isn’t a live review, though. This is about what happened after I patched the cracks in my chin from where it had hit the floor. I decided to go discography exploring. And that’s when I met Bashling.
I feel a bit guilty about how quickly I fell in love with a song that’s been around forever. How long? About six years or so. I am so late to the scene, I am a n00b in the Emperor X clique and I already have a My Song, that’s not right.
Never mind, I am too busy playing it over and over and over again on a university PC alternating the official gazer version with a ‘live’ version which may as well be a different song for its lack of gaze but that I love to pieces all the same.
I think it’s because I can make out the words in the non-gaze version (thus the gazelessness). And it’s beautiful even when it’s stripped down to six strings (not counting vocal chords). There’s this line that frames the song – “wanted to climb to you… on the swing set” – and it absolutely kills me. I think it’s so devastating because you can’t really clamber about effectively on a swing set without the risk of moderate injury. So for someone to want someone else so much that they’re willing to take that risk in a setting as innocently harmless as a swing set – that’s just heartbreaking.
Of course I might be wrong. The ‘swing set’ might be more than the couple of steel-threaded planks of wood that I see. But that’s what I want it to be so THAT’S WHAT IT IS. Don’t question my interpretation, I’m not questioning what a ‘bashling’is now am I?
What’s a bashling?
