Category: Album

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Album Review

Echodrone – Mixtape For Duckie

Hardworking is the band that records one album while writing another album.

While working on the follow-up to Bon Voyage, Echodrone took some time out to unwind by creating a collection of cover songs. As you do.

The heads up I got for Mixtape for Duckie had me even more excited than news of their follow-up album will.

Unless, the announcement of their next release ALSO contains the words ‘George Michael‘.

George Michael was my first famous-person crush/love. My first memorised discography. My first mailing list. Even now, in the more advanced and progressive (or primitive?) stage of my musical life, I would put ‘Soon’ on pause just to have 6 uninterrupted minutes with ‘The Strangest Thing’.


[you can tell the inclination towards shoegaze started early]

Now, cover songs – there’s an art form. When Eugene wrote to tell me about Mixtape for Duckie, he made it sound like recording an album’s worth of cover songs, each from a different era/genre, was some dinky paint-by-numbers scene. Good lord, successfully executing a cover version of a song is often a bigger achievement than pushing out all-new material. When working on your own stuff, your benchmark is yourself. When making a cover version, you are well-aware you’re going to be compared to whoever you’re choosing to reinterpret. And Higher-Power-Of-Choice help you if you pick a well-loved track to operate on.

Not one but SIX beloved songs sit happily in the digital grooves of Mixtape for Duckie. What are you DOING, Echodrone? I ask, simultaneously eager and apprehensive. ‘WE FEAR NOTHING’, they declare as they wriggle into ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’, deftly replacing Numan’s capitulation with…

with..

what IS that?

HOPE?

Yep – no longer a vanquished sigh, Echodrone’s version is less wistful and more curious. Less jaded, and more genuine.

Even more astounding is their version of ‘Cry Little Sister’. Immaculate – it doesn’t lose its conviction quite as much as it loses its solitude. It’s an irrepressibly beautiful interpretation of the original which now appears to only have been brought into existence so it could live to be transformed into this more liberated, more elevated, less isolated mantra.

And then, Echodrone chose to tackle GM’s ‘Praying For Time’ – the despondent narration of the demise of humanity (or, more precisely, humaneness). In their version, it’s the instrumentation that carries the apocalypse. The bridge “the rich declare themselves poor/and most of us are not sure/if we have too much/but we’ll take our chances/because god’s stopped keeping score” etc. is swirled around, sucked into, and spat out of the noise around it. The essence of the song isn’t lost – it’s just being carried by waves instead of words.

It’s a few years ago now that a, presumably unofficial, three-part mixtape hit the online airwaves. In it, shoegazers covered other shoegazers. While I have my favourites from that collection, the futility of the exercise was apparent. Even the best of tracks were black and white xeroxes of untouchable originals. Learn from Echodrone – Why imitate, when you can adopt?

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Album Review

Memory Tapes – Grace/Confusion

It’s not about the hair anymore.

There used to be a time you could judge the quality of a musician or a group solely by the quality of their hair – the fondly remembered and profoundly missed age of the music video. I always was partial to the 90s.

But they don’t do videos these days.

I didn’t know what Dayve (Hawke) looked like when I first got a taste of Memory Cassette. I remember asking after ‘Ghost in the Boombox’ as it oozed out of and ebbed away from turned-up car speakers one evening in 2008. I remember (figuratively) attaching myself to ‘Asleep at a Party’ the way Carol-Anne stuck to the TV set on the accompanying image of the non-EP The Hiss We Missed.

I didn’t know if this was one fellow or many. I couldn’t tell if it was a she or a he. I didn’t know much at all till the pre-release activity around Seek Magic compelled me to do my research on Memory Tapes. First when I wrote about Bicycle, then again when I wrote about the full-length. Putting out an album is no small deal – the individual I’d come to regard as a quiet, content, recluse – had to come out of hiding.

Wouldn’t you know it:

dayve

THAT HAIR… it can’t do wrong.

As it turns out, the most successful track on Grace/Confusion is the first. ‘Neighbourhood Watch’, on its own, carries the conviction that the Green Knight‘s desolate moaning (Remember ‘I want to give you my love, I want to call your name, at the sound of my voice, you turn away…’?) worked out for the best in the end. At the outset, it’s a sleepy, languid thing, not unlike Seek Magic‘s own starter (the dog shows up too). Similarly, hearing the first warbles of ‘I watch you sleep’ is consoling in its tenderness. Unless you decide to recall the song’s title at just that moment, at which point it becomes a little unsettling.

So no one found Padosan a bit unsettling either?
So no one found Padosan a bit concerning either?

I struggle to come to terms with Memory Tapes’ popularity – it seems incongruous to my original image of the guy. You know – the basement musician whose dedication to music led to him creating different monikers for different styles. This way we never got too attached to one style or sound, and he wasn’t bound to any one of them either. Weird Tapes is the one you twirl to, Memory Cassette is the one you swirl to. Hail Social is completely unpretentious – the most confident, self-aware he’s ever been. Memory Tapes is… well… great,definitely, but…

It feels unnatural.

Suddenly, from talking to us from We’re Tapes, sharing basement recordings for no reason beyond having recorded them, MT’s all over P4K.

It feels like we’ve lost him.

And maybe we have.

There’s nothing to complain about in Grace/Confusion – there are too many familiar faces – the neighbour’s dog, the chipmunk choir, the stoned samurai – but if you hadn’t met them before, would they warm your heart the way they did when you first heard them?

There’s something different, though – different from the naiveté and intimacy of (even) Seek Magic, and more pronounced than what we heard in Player Piano.

Maybe the vibe I’m getting from Grace/Confusion is the same vibe I’m giving out with this writing: self-consciousness.

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Album Review

Flies On You – Nothing To Write Home About

What's in it

I’ve been putting off writing about Flies On You for ages now, much to Doug’s discontent. I can give you the standard ‘life stuff’ reason blaming work and study and suchlike for limiting time I can devote to AE (sorry, AE, I still love you, you’re my baby, mwah). Or I can give you the real reason – I’m sort of scared.

(But wait a minute – who’s Doug?)

We’ll get to that.

We have another //orangenoise situation on our hands. Once again, I have to walk the fine line between cutting edge insider scoop and TMI.

From the start Flies on You have been labelled post-punk. I can’t recall whether this was their own doing (‘DIY post-punk’ proclaims their bio) or something imposed on them by an over-eager fan, but where that idea came from remains a mystery. In response to your question, Doug (Aikman) is the chap to whom I owe most of my coolth (except for the shoegaze bit – that one’s me and Richard Ashcroft). He’s the one who saved me from the classic rock abyss for which I am eternally grateful. He gave me my first tastes of My Bloody Valentine, Spiritualized, Killing Joke, Big Black, Sonic Youth, Julian Cope and The Teardrop Explodes, Luke Haines and the Auteurs, and, thankfully, never shared a Radiohead song with me throughout (ILU, Doug). Despite this behemoth of musical expertise living in his brain, how he and Andrew (Watkins) could so grossly mislabel their own band is inexplicable. They’re only post-punk because they were once punk, I proudly declared one day. Then I declared it a few more times in the coming days because I was that proud of the line. D offered to make it the band’s byline in an attempt to get me to stop repeating it, but that idea never took off, possibly because last.fm tags are set in stone.

You see, Doug used to be in a punk band of his own back when post-punk was just winding up. When zines, not blogs, kept you cool. Nerve Rack were post-punk punk, which means they, like Flies on You, weren’t very post-punk at all. So if they aren’t what they say they are, what are they?

Indie?
What does that even mean? No.
Alternative?
Ew. No.
Shoegaze?
There are pockets, but not really. (maybe with some convincing?)
Experimental?
Nice try! No.
Dubstep?
Maybe the next album, right now – no.
Reggae/Dub?
Yea…. we’re not getting anywhere.

We’ve no choice but to rely on our own observations. Egad, I can’t remember the last time my dependence on genre pigeonholes allowed me to do that.

There’s a (predictable) preference, on Nothing To Write Home About, for talking over singing. There’s also a lyrical tendency to narrate rather than emote. The words to ‘Spain’, admirably accomplish both by following up a personal narrative with the emotionally-aware chorus ‘you fucking cow’. But that’s where the sentimentality ends. Don’t try to pass off ‘You’re Shite’ as emotive, when it is simply fact. None of the tracks on this album really look you in the eye. They don’t look at you at all. Each one appears to be talking to someone else. These aren’t empathetic songs, they’re reality (real life doesn’t know you exist).

I wish I could label them ‘punk’ and be done with it, but alas – they’re far from that simple. Listen to ‘Slashing it Down’, f’rinstance. Is that a hint of – it couldn’t be – REM? The harmonies – they’re straight off Out Of Time. That’s not very punk (post or otherwise) at all.

Listen to ‘Muh-m-m-m-m-muh’ – the descriptive title does nothing to warn you of the climactic little cannonball within its one and a half minutes.

And no punks in their right mind would, even ironically, ever use the word ‘pop’ in a song title.

And no punks have ever had a song as mellow, as sophisticated, or as long as ‘The last pop song’. Five whole minutes! You spoil us, FoY!

But, if in your cramped life, you find you can’t squeeze in the time to listen to the entirety of Nothing To Write Home About, do me just this one favour. Listen to ‘Yeah, wild I know but, nonetheless’. Pay no attention to the misplaced comma – it means nothing. Or does it?

Flies On You are the “b-side babies” of whom Adam(Ant) wisely spoke. They merely tolerate the anaemic epithet “DIY post-punk” as a descriptor of their oeuvre. Needs must, etc.

Them’s the band’s own words. If you’re listening on bandcamp, play each track from its individual page, just so you can revel in the delicate little stories subheads they’ve provided for each. Ah – how we’ve missed having album liner notes to lose our vision to.

Oi, hang on – I just noticed I’m thanked for ‘a fragment of a lyric’ – what lyric?

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Album Review

//orangenoise – A Journey To The Heart of Matter

I don’t see how it could make any sense to anyone else. Perhaps if you possess the selfishness of an only child you’ll understand. Maybe if you tend to adopt and nurture inanimate objects and abstract concepts, you’ll understand. Could be you’ll understand anyway.

I was there when //orangenoise formed. Well, that’s not the clearest statement. Technically, I was ‘there’ when Slowdive formed, but I can’t speak about them with the same intimacy as I’m about to. No, by ‘there’, I mean I watched //orangenoise come together. The very name was created in front of my eyes (on the 1st of June 2010, fyi) (I was a bit iffy about the ‘orange’ bit the way I’m iffy about all major decisions).

FUN FACT: //orangenoise was almost called //Feedback before suspicions led to double-checking and the unsurprising discovery that the latter was already taken.

I’d known Talha Wynne for all of three months then. We’d become friends thanks to a ‘gaze community we both milled about in. He was putting together a new band in the wake of the dissolution of the last. Two years on I’ve watched //orangenoise be created and named, I’ve listened to them record and put out an EP (Veracious), remixes, some stuff in between, as well as work on solo material (Toll Crane, Alien Panda Jury). And I’ve done it all while, for the most part, not even being on the same continent as the band.

This is the point where I have to ask you to go back to the first paragraph and try, really TRY, to understand, why //orangenoise are ‘mine’.

Now I’m back where I belong and they’re RIGHT HERE (border control begs to differ) and after all this, I want nothing more than to just be able to reach out and be where the analog sounds are.

But I can’t because visas and politics, so I’ll make do by just talking about it.

Veracious was a astounding album, no doubt. If you’re not from Pakistan or India, you have to bear in mind that access to some of the amenities that many take for granted isn’t quite as natural in these parts. The power doesn’t stay on, recording studios aren’t terribly common, equipment is expensive, audiences are nicher, and, most significantly, music production isn’t a common or an encouraged skill. Veracious stoutly defied whatever would have held it back. Until I heard A Journey To The Heart of Matter I thought Veracious had achieved the almost impossible. Hooks, clarity, diversity, and (shoegazey) tradition – it was all there.

But Journey is jaw-dropping. We’d had a teaser a few months back in the form of ‘Clipped’, and then, more recently, they dropped the opener ‘I Don’t Know‘. At the time we heard ‘Clipped’, we had no idea there was an album coming up, but it was obvious that Veracious was long gone. The ‘Clipped’ we heard was recorded live for LussunTV and even in that unforgiving setting it was proof positive that //ON had hit and crossed its adolescence with astonishing velocity. What paranormal hormones gave ‘Clipped’ its barely believable maturity so soon after we’d heard Veracious‘s to-be-expected innocence?

Wait till you hear the album version, though. Re-recorded and re-produced, it enhances nuances you didn’t realise existed as it spins, churns, and tumbles, with something hypnotic in its agility. It’s follow-up, ‘Chaser’ is similar and endowed with less of a hook, and more of a somersault – it twists and winds into itself, rolling itself out just before it gets caught up in tangles. Aforementioned opener ‘I Don’t Know’ is a the pinnacle of sophistication. You can tell there’s sophistication in a song when it remembers that there’s sound in silence.

I could go on, speaking about each song in turn. But given my obvious bias, perhaps it’s better if you do some of the work yourself.

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Album Review

Dead Can Dance – Anastasis

Australia is a funny place. In the third of my four years living there I discovered something peculiar.

There are no successful Australians in Australia.

It seems that if you were born in the lucky country, you’re destined to live a life of mediocrity unless you get out.

Call it ‘tall poppy syndrome’ or call it ‘crab mentality’ or call it any of the sociological terms that no doubt exist specifically to describe the phenomenon wherein success is undesirable unless it is available to all.

It’s possibly to do with the fact that, despite being a monster of a landmass, its population is nearly negligible and there’s unlikely to be anyone doing what you are (or interested in what you are doing) and so, in the absence of competition and the prevalence of unending, unconditional, indiscernible praise for anything ‘local’, there isn’t really an incentive to improve.

So I thank the heavens Dead Can Dance got out of there before they had even put out their first album. Here is is a band that a nation should be proud of. There are plenty of good Australian bands, but DCD are among the few that can be put up on global display.

Only – not while they’re in Australia. No one knows them there.

It could be because their style is so diffuse. ‘World Music’ some say. A label that is almost offensive for how it divides music and instrumentation into ‘from the developed world’ and ‘from the not-as-developed World’. Others take the names This Mortal Coiland Cocteau Twins in the same breath. And here’s me, stubbornly stuck (we presume) on labelling anything that is even REMOTELY exotic, operatic, and noisy – shoegaze.

Pigeonholing, shoeboxing, we should all give it up.

What a relief it is when Anastasis opens up. It’s absolute subjectivity and total partiality but O – the comfort that comes with hearing something that sounds like what you would have heard in your childhood. Perhaps on a mixtape one of your aunt’s friends made for her while she was at university that she left behind after she married and that you adopted as your own and played till the tape unwound and you had to wind it back with a 2HB pencil before putting it back in again and falling asleep to it till the songs were all etched into your brain, except that the handwriting on the case was illegible so you never remembered the names of the tracks, only the sounds and so you turned the rest of your life into an RPG where you set out on quests to rediscover each of them knowing only a melody and a line of lyrics.

Totally would ace that game if one of Brendan Perry’s tracks was as on this hypothetical (really?) mixtape because, pffft what is Google if not an IRL cheat code? However, if it had been one of Lisa Gerrard’s numbers on this hypothetical (REALLY??) tape, then we’d be sunk. You come to expect Cocteau Twins comparisons for the shared glossolalia and voice modulation. A natural train of thought, except that I hear my grandfather’s Gregorian Chants CD (more nostalgia). Gerrard’s voice seems far more elastic than Fraser’s with neither appearing to exist independently of each other, with no sign that fate had deemed it necessary for their paths to cross.

Anastasis is not a difficult album to warm up to. It maintains its uniqueness throughout, but it’s also got a welcome, throwback familiarity. Watch out for the closer (‘All in Good Time’), though… an excessively languid pace runs the risk of dulling the taste that the brightness and novelty the rest of the album brought you.

Speaking of familiarity, allow me to present ‘Opium’ to you. Where is the percussion from? We’ve heard it somewhere before…

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Album Discover

This Was Tomorrow – An Interview With Sway

Back in 2010 when Sway first released the followup to the now classic Millia Pink and Green EP, I offered to review it for him on this here blog. Many a draft was started, but I wasn’t quite able to express the everything about This Was Tomorrow that made it so special. This Was Tomorrow‘s USP is its complete and utter departure from The Millia Pink and Green and this has, unsurprisingly, left a few of the old-school gazers confused. Me, I see Millia Pink and Green and This Was Tomorrow as entirely different, uncomparable pieces of work. However I think think the poor purists would like an explanation. So putting my electrogaze tendencies aside I decide to ask The Man Himself (hi Andrew!) a few Qs about the album so we can get all your perplexedness cleared up.

I’m quite happy I took so long to get around to this because just last month, Sway signed up to Saint Marie Records and so This Was Tomorrow had a fresh release on the 7th of June this year. That’s enough excitement and goings-on in the Life of Sway to make up an entire interview, I thought. So here you go:

The St. Marie Records signing was something like 6 months after you independently released This Was Tomorrow. What’s the story behind that? Is TWT going to be out in many formats? CD, Vinyl, tape, 8-track… Also what would you consider the official release date?

This Was Tomorrow was initially intended to be a “digital only” release via iTunes, Bandcamp, etc. I really only wanted to have it out in that format as I’m very much on-board with the idea of digital distribution of music. I love it. I totally understand the desires of many music fans that want a tangible copy of an album, but for me the most important thing is getting people to hear my music in the easiest and most convenient way possible. I really kind of feel that compact discs are on the way out. The album actually was released as a download only in November of 2010, and a couple of months after the release Saint Marie Records hit me up to do a CD release of the album. I had received so many emails asking about when TWT would be released on CD that I was planning to do a special limited run, and the Saint Marie offer came just in time. So, for now, you have TWT as a digital download and a CD. I suppose I consider June 7th, 2011 to be the official release…

TWT is totally different from The Millia Pink & Green EP. I know there’ve been some “you’ve abandoned us!” reactions from the purists because (I think) it’s far more electrogaze than classic shoegaze. Much more digital than analog. I’m just speculating it was the 8-bitter in you that compelled you to make the record. You know better so tell me – what were you thinking about when you made each record?

Well, when I guess it’s pretty obvious that my influences are bands like Slowdive, Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, Lush, etc. When we did The Millia Pink and Green, I wanted to do a very swirly album that would set us apart mostly from a lot of stuff that was going on locally here on the West coast (US). At that time, there really weren’t many bands doing the kind of stuff we were around here, and I really wanted to do something that would be just a million miles away from all of the other albums coming out.
I have always been obsessed with things that sound lost and blurry in music. Things that sound beautiful but strange, that’s why I was drawn to dreampop early on. I always loved Enya and ethereal sounding stuff, and I like my pop music that way too.
With The Millia P&G, I was just looking to make a blurry, floaty, windy EP that would be a reminder of what Sway was doing live at the time. When people came to our shows (we played a lot back then, believe it or not) they would usually be somewhat confused by the sounds we were putting out and I’m sure wondered if most of it were intentionally done, you know? So, this was like a reminder or proof that, yeah, we actually made music that sounded that way, and meant to.

I’ve always been a gamer. All of the Sway kids were. We all grew up with Atari and Nintendo stuff. There is something about 8-bit sounds and all that, that really gets my nostalgia machine working. For me, part of the whole dreampop thing is this weird nostalgic daydream feeling that’s induced by swirly guitars. I realized a few years ago that those retro game sounds also have the same effect on me, perhaps even more so, so I had to squeeze them in there. In my opinion, it totally works. I’m not trying to abandon all of the people that are faithful to the textbook shoegaze sounds or anything, I just feel there’s room for new sounds in this “genre”. I’m actually kinda bummed that it’s far easier for most bands these days to more or less emulate Slowdive or My Bloody Valentine twenty years later and have people eat it up. That bugs me. I honestly love the classics and steal from them all day long in my own way, but I constantly feel pressured to not go too far when it comes to borrowing from them and their sounds or songwriting. TWT is a dreampop album that uses plenty of my influences, and adds some new stuff that you might not expect for this kind of music. It’s good to mix it up a bit. I think if people give this album a real listen, they’ll appreciate it more. I made this for the listeners, the people that put on headphones and like to lose themselves in the music.

What is a day in the life of Sway – are you a rockstar, an oversized kid, or just a normal 9-to-5-er?

Definitely as far from a rockstar as can be. I’m a dad, a husband, and I have a full time job at a place that is totally unrelated to music, art, or anything remotely creative at all. I’m older now, and I’m very busy and tired. I don’t love music any less than I used to. It’s torture to not have many chances these days to just create music the way I used to and took it for granted, but I still find time every now and then, and that’s fine. It will never let me achieve any huge popularity or fan base from touring and doing all the promo work that “successful” bands do, but I think I’m okay with that. I love the fact that new people are always finding out about Sway on the internet and from friends.

Even the most dedicated shoegazer likes more than just shoegaze. What completely different music does your alterego(s) like?

I honestly don’t listen to much “nugazer” stuff these days unless I’m exposed to it by friends, or people I meet or whatever. Most that I do hear though, I really like a lot! I don’t actively seek out new shoegaze bands. I do listen to all the classic stuff from time to time to feed my cravings. As far as other styles that I like, I know it may sound cliché, but I do listen to tons of jazz. My first instrument was the saxophone, and I still play every now and then. I love the freedom of jazz improvisation. I love the experimental and sometimes dissonant chord progressions of avant-garde jazz and “new thing” jazz. I also love modern “classical” composers and electronic art stuff. I like crazy Japanese noise/electronic stuff. Anime soundtracks. Minimalist classical, anything experimental and pretty. I’m not into that much electronica unless it’s ethereal and not too…electronica-ish. I grew up in the 1980s so I kind of have a soft spot for late 70s and 80s pop stuff. I have very fond memories of being a little kid and listening to my walkman all night to some of the top 40 stuff through out the mid and late eighties. I mention it a lot, but one of the reasons that I’m drawn to dreampop is memories of falling asleep with my headphones on, and waking up late at night, in a sleepy haze and hearing Pet Shop Boys or Lionel Ritchie or Swing Out Sister or something, whispering to me in my ears. I love the Beatles. I’ve always loved Michael Jackson’s music. “Human Nature” is one of my all time favorite songs. The older I get, the less I like hip, cutting edge “alternative” and “indie” music. It’s all starting to sound like noise to me now, and not so much in a good way. It’s weird but true. Is that sad, or what?

Do you want to know how I first heard about Sway? It’s not super-interesting, but I thought you might like to know since it was not thru the internet (shock!).

Sway: Hmmmm… not through the internet, huh? I’m very curious! I doubt that you took a leap of faith and bought a Sway CD from Tonevendor without a recommendation or something… or did you? A friend?

Me: Well I guess it was indirectly the internet. But I think it’s cool because I wasn’t a part of the Shoegaze Collective at the time (because it didn’t really exist to the extent it does now). I only knew a handful of shoegazers from the internet and one of them I’d known since I was in India and he lived in Australia. So a couple of years after I landed in Melbourne we worked out we weren’t too far apart and decided to meet for the first time. He’s like shoegaze bourgeoisie. I don’t know where he gets his info from but even the most thorough scouring of the internet doesn’t reveal to me the stuff he knows as soon as he knows it. He left me with a few names on our first meeting and was positively RAVING about the Millia Pink and Green. Till This Was Tomorrow I always associated Sway with “Fall” and, I don’t know if you know this, but it’s a classic now. Anyway, I think it’s pretty cool that the first time I heard about Sway was via FACE-TO-FACE CONVERSATION omg.

———
This Was Tomorrow needed a bit of creator input so that listeners can understand it better and see it as less of an abandonment of the classic sounds of shoegaze and more of an evolution of Sway’s own work. I called it Chillgaze when I first heard it, can we make that a genre? See if you think otherwise and pick up This Was Tomorrow here.

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Album Review

Tears Run Rings – Distance (2010)

It started with ‘Mind The Wires’.

‘Mind the Wires is a song off Tears Run Rings’ first album. It is one of the most exquisitely understanding, most sympathetic songs I have ever had the privilege to hear. I am (unsurprisingly) not quite sure what they’re saying, and while I would like to know, I am quite happy in my lyrical ignorance thanks to a comforting Discernible Lyric Template that ensures the involuntary filler lyrics you insert can do no damage.

You do want to know, though. A template that looks like this:

“Mind the wires, let your love…

Slow down – slow down, be careful

A million stars…”

And also includes:

“Say goodbye…

… stay a while.”

leaves you craving the words you miss every time you listen.

Tears Run Rings don’t get enough credit. Even within shoegaze circles they are oft overlooked and perhaps the most unfairly ignored of all neo-gaze bands. This might be because they don’t appear to travel in the same incestuous musical circles* as several of the others appear to. But they are easily somewhere at the top of the pile in terms of expertise and expression. You can see their honesty manifest itself in their delicately vague song titles, the hazy abstractness obvious in such detached album names as Always, Sometimes, Seldom, Never and even more glaringly so in Distance… which is what I’m supposed to be talking about, by the way. Sorry, ‘Mind The Wires’ always distracts me from the task at hand.

‘Happiness 3’ is a lovely way to start Distance and is, in my humble but somewhat reliable opinion, better than its prequels. It is a stunning, twilit vocal waltz – two voices swirl in each others’ metaphorical arms melting into one another in the kind of blinkered love that leaves you oblivious to your surrounds. Lost in themselves, twisting elegantly into a dewy double helix.

‘Intertia’ is the song with the most personality on the album thanks to some rebellious drums that develop a mind of their own mid-verse and wander off  the set path for a few liberated seconds before snapping out of their reverie, gathering their bearings and reining themselves back in. And ‘Reunion’ is surprisingly psychedelic, radiating the echoes the Jesus and Mary Chain trademarked. The only song I find myself not such a fan of is the much hyped (by TRR standards, of course) offering, ‘Forgotten’. Don’t misunderstand me, ‘Forgotten’ is a great song. But I am left slightly cold by the jarring in-and-out-ros, the guitars screaming a little to harshly to follow the cradle set up by Happiness 3 and appearing out of place in the song itself.

I’m having some trouble adequately expressing how transcendent the title track is. ‘Distance’ the song is an absolute gem, with a melody and words tender enough to coax even the most ardent insomniac to, if not sleep, at the very least a state of out-of-body other-worldly suspension. “We are tired but we can’t go to sleep” – you couldn’t have asked for a more compassionate statement. Tears Run Rings say the words for you and then – “here I am” – say the words to you. You can feel them gently stroking your hair right up to the magnificently crashing close that unfailingly sends ripples through your bloodstream.

It’s quite obvious how much I am in love with this song isn’t it? It’s a seven minute long track and I listened to it five times in the course of writing the preceding paragraph. 35 minutes. I may as well have blinked.

‘Distance’ is followed by the unsettlingly sweet-sounding ‘Divided’. “I try to scream…” says a voice of icy, crystal honey that you know is incapable of such an unmelodious act – and this very thought is what makes the song so disquieting.

I’m quite happy with TRR’s relative elusiveness. It’s not just a matter of having a band you love all to yourself. It goes beyond the mere selfish protectiveness we tend to coat our favourite possessions with (though, no doubt, I am rather pleased with how much more mine this makes them). No, I am also in favour of this because it means there’s less pressure on them.  You know? As in, I’d imagine they’re their own strongest influence. Distance takes its time to unfurl. It’s unhurried and natural – untouched by expectations from peers or industry. Like its predecessor, it’s unadulterated.

[*I love how those incestuous circles are so reminiscent of the original ‘Scene That Celebrates Itself’ mentality. It’s like an involuntary homage to classic shoegaze.]

Categories
Album Review

The Fauns – The Fauns (2010)

I think this album is psychic.

I’m usually all about maximum feasible objectivity when discussing an album, trying not to let what I feel get the better of me and instead aiming to express what I think the music is meant to sound like. However, in this case, I am writing for myself, because The Fauns‘ self-titled album can read minds.

I remember feeling a bit low when I first played it. It’s a bit of a risk exposing yourself to a new piece of music when you’re in a negative frame of mind. Actually, it’s a bit of a risk exposing the music to you, because it might wind up irreversibly tainted by your black mood and beautiful shoegaze doesn’t deserve that at all.

Then again, maybe that is precisely why I subjected the Fauns to me. Already familiar with their brand of blisspop, I wasn’t the least bit surprised when they sympathetically enveloped me in their shimmery fuzz, understanding and forgiving me the mistakes I’d made that had put me in this sticky, muggy mood.

It was easy enough, of course, to zone out and drift along with the current. Before long, however an arresting phrase wafted in and out of focus. “Calm down/It’s going to be all right” it said. An involuntary public frown – it had vanished so quickly, maybe I’d imagined it? No, there it was again. I looked down to see what this windswept song was called making a note calling ‘Road Meets The Sky’ the Psychic Song.

Two tracks later, it was re-tagged The First Psychic Song when ‘Come Around Again’ dropped the unsettlingly sympathetic line “stay calm/no harm/will come/to you.”

And when I listened to the album again, it was re-re-tagged One Of The Psychic Songs. This was when the incredibly, overpoweringly, so-very-genuinely supportive ‘Understand’ caught my attention with the disguised profundity in the simple lyric “When hope is gone/I’ll understand” –

Yet how could the Fauns NOT understand? They’ve been there and beyond. They know what you’re feeling because they’ve felt the same and they helplessly, belatedly reach out to you with ‘Fragile’ – the only moment on the album they devote to their own desolation. ‘Fragile’ is beautiful in its precision – through limiting each line to a two-syllable mantra, it manages to convey everything about a single sad instant – right down to what time of day of the week it is. Juxtaposing a phrase like “perfect/moment” seamlessly with “fragile/…broken” it is filled with tragic splendour. It closes with the same false disaffection that launched it, murmuring with a fatal sort of dejection “heartbeat/slowing” and finally “inside/broken.”

Like I said, I usually strive to be neutral. But this album is a shape-shifting empath, therefore I can only offer you an interpretation of what it says to me. Hopefully, you hear what I do, in which case… phew – objectivity prevails.

Categories
Album Review

Me You Us Them – Post-Data (2010)

In all my shoegazing discoveries this year, none has satisfied me to such an extent as Me You Us Them‘s debut LP has. This album sounds NEW from the first track in, and you had better get your rating finger ready for some serious 5-star clicking. Order in a neck brace as well, the riffs and melodies have a hook enough to get your head bobbing through-out the record till its done.

My first impression of Post-Data had me preparing myself for post-punk onslaught, but as I listened to the album over and over, the dense chords lying in the back made their way up and I was introduced to the wall of sound reminiscent of I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness‘ textural driving buildups. There’s enough swerve in the guitars to fill up your brain’s drone capacitors only to be complimented by the driving grooves that keep your feet busy for, say, about the length of the entire album?

The album’s only just started and already “Any Time’ has you hooked – full of enough key elements to keep the gazer in you more than satisfied. Elastic chords suspending you from the pivot point of the beat while the bass provides all the tension. Each track that follows builds up your appetite for the next. There’s a distinct two chord swerved out riff which I find myself holding on to as a bookmark for each track.

The track that instantaneously stands out is “Drugs’ – it takes you up in with the atmospheric sound wash in the back only to drive you to the edge of a cliff where you hear the words “chin up child, don’t give up”, and it just keeps getting higher from there on. “iQuit’ takes the role of building up to the self titled track, and here’s something interesting – the groove hasn’t let go of you and we’re about 7 tracks down.

It’s this constant driving force in their sound that keeps pushing you further and further still, till you activate your drift and you’re caught in the current . Post-Data transitions from light to dark as you progress from the first track on to the last, but it doesn’t leave you in the shadows once you’re done cruising your way to the end. It only deprives you of their sound when it closes and there really is nothing much you can do but rewind and find yourself stuck in this endless circle of Me You Us Them.

The graphic designer in me really likes the whole retro-modern album art. The hand made silk screened cover is made to look like an old floppy disk, with the pixelation on the record visible through the negative spaces. It’s a perfect depiction of nostalgia and innovation, which is pretty much the sound this band has managed to create. I’ve checked on all the boxes on my shoegaze list and given 5 stars for each track… EACH TRACK! Post-Data is a compilation of all your favorite songs that you haven’t heard yet. I’ve only managed to catch a few videos off of youtube and I can clearly see them rocking out major shows pretty soon in the future! Go ahead check them out yourself… http://meyouusthem.com/

Categories
Album Review

Soundpool – Mirrors In Your Eyes (2010)

I’ve had the new Soundpool record on repeat for most of the past week. At the start of the year I had no idea they were even planning on releasing an LP, so when Mirrors in your Eyes dropped, I was pleasantly surprised since I’d already been charmed senseless by On High and Dichotomies and Dreamland.

Listening to it, I think of the music critic cliché often used to describe a pleasing follow-up attempt by a band: ‘mature’. Bands ‘mature’, they develop a more ‘mature’ sound and create an album more ‘mature’ than its predecessors.

What does that even mean?

Is a band mature when it creates an album with an expertly engineered playlist crafted to ensure the songs seamlessly flow into each other like semi-set jelly? Surely not – they must need to be able to skilfully include some sort of distinction amongst the tracks – they must be able to demonstrate an ability to work with a myriad of styles and variations without faltering or appearing to be paddling hopelessly out of their depth.

I hadn’t pondered the meaning of that single word when used in the context of writing about records till I listened to Mirrors in your Eyes. I listened and then I listened again. And the I listened a few more times because I could hear something in it. I could hear maturity.

It’s easy enough to be a well-loved shoegaze band – the core sound structures of the genre are so inherently beautiful that even the most derivative ensembles can produce pieces of sheer magic. Piggybacking on influences is not a concern, it is usually welcomed and warmly rewarded. The more you manage to sound like Slowdive, the more we will love you.

Only Soundpool aren’t doing that. Anymore. They’ve abandoned the camouflage of their last albums and thrown themselves into gazer territory that I have never seen charted before:

Discogaze.

Yep, straight of the bat we’re hit hard on the head with a spinning mirrorball that establishes the album as one TO BE SHARED. This is not introspective music you beg for comfort as you to curl up in a dark corner of your barely-lit room when you’re going through one of your emo phases. This is music you haphazardly pogo stick to in the middle of a barely-lit club while psychedelic light stencils flash erratically over you and your posse.

I’d like to make an exception for ‘Makes No Sense’, however. The polish of production has significantly glossed up the version we were so far familiar with. This is a song I want to keep to myself, all to myself and not share with anyone. I love the early 90s college mixtape feel of it. I love the blissfully fuzzed out vocals. I love the guitar that crashes over Kim’s voice in the second verse – her completely incomprehensible words remaining disaffectedly stoic despite the wonderfully rude interruption. And I love the slippery hook that lasts the duration of the song manifesting itself in every facet of the song, repeating itself over and over and like some sort of white powder – sugar, salt or cocaine – leaving you craving more, leaving you positively aching to sing along, but helpless to do anything more than hit ‘repeat’.

It’s followed by a sweet little number that calls itself ‘Sparkle in the Dark’ (can’t have a gazer album without a word like ‘sparkle’ in one of the tracks). It’s the perfect comedown after its brain-blending predecessor – a thoughtfully chosen dessert wine that drops you lightly back onto the Studio 54-y dancefloor. And that’s where you remain as your night draws on. Even a song like ‘I’m So Tired’ leaves you swaying lazily, head tossed back, as you allow your body to recharge.

Incredibly comforting, ‘That Sunny Day’ propels itself along on the wheels of a semi-distant fade in/out bada-bahbah-bah-BAH hook. They must have sensed your second wind because final tracks and possible cousins ‘Shelter’ and ‘Listen’ swoop in at just the right moment offering your weary but still mobile self exceptionally shimmery melodies with beats perfectly timed to ensure you remain happily mobile and conveniently ignorant of how they’re winding you down at the end of the night.

No, no – no mopey faces. The album’s over, but remember that ‘repeat’ button you have at your disposal. I’m using mine to drown in ‘Makes No Sense’ again, but feel free to release the prismatic evening as many times as you like.