Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Shoegazer Sunday: Hollie Blue Covers “Fade Into You”

Sunday, March 17th, 2024

Here’s UK performer Hollie Blue covering Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You.”

Not bad, and she’s easy on the eyes…

Shoegazer Sunday: School of Seven Bells’ “Ablaze”

Sunday, March 3rd, 2024

SVIIB is School of Seven Bells’ last album, compiled from the tracks laid down by Benjamin Curtis before he died and completed by vocalist Alejandra Deheza. Here’s opening track “Ablaze,” which is pretty groovetastic.

Shoegazer Sunday: Slowdive’s “Catch The Breeze” Live in Copenhagen

Sunday, January 28th, 2024

Been a while since I put up a Shoegazer Sunday post, so here’s a live version of “Catch the Breeze” from Slowdive’s 1/21/24 shoe in Copenhagen.

Vocals aren’t great, but the rest of the sound is pretty good.

Christmas Shoegazer: Stellarscope’s “Silent Night”

Monday, December 25th, 2023

As is the now annual tradition, enjoy Stellarscope’s version of “Silent Night”:

Merry Christmas!

Shoegazer Sunday: Great Northern’s “Radio”

Sunday, October 22nd, 2023

My relationship to Great Northern is weird. I liked what I heard off Remind Me Where The Light Is enough to buy it, listened to it a lot for a while, and then just…stopped. I can’t even explain why I stopped. It’s a mystery, like the waning of a pestilence. That album is superbly crafted Shoegaze-tinged pop that sounds bit like Tamaryn.

“Radio,” an earlier effort off Sleepy Eepee, is a different sort of beast, like Mazzy Starr crossed with some buzzy low-fi band. Singer Rachel Stolte has a compelling voice.

Despite not listening to them for years, YouTube occasionally offers them up in my feed. A good thing, too.

They evidently toured with Smashing Pumpkins this year, and are supposedly working on a new album.

I Saw Peter Gabriel in Austin Last Night

Thursday, October 19th, 2023

I saw the Peter Gabriel concert at the Moody Center in Austin on October 18. It was the third time I’d seen Gabriel perform live, and he put on a good show. We had tickets facing center stage in the mezzanine section, and they were quite pricey.

About half the songs are off the forthcoming I/O album, while the other half are from other parts of his career (“Sledgehammer,” “Solsbury Hill,” etc.). His tour ensemble was a mixture of old familiar faces (the always excellent Tony Levin, Manu Katche and David Rhodes) and new (cellist/vocalist Ayanna Witter-Johnson, who was very good).

They had an interesting multimedia setup with projection surfaces on different stage elements that they could move, as well as close-up cameras for projecting on either wing (and occasionally the giant circular moveable hanging surface that was the centerpiece of the set).

I think the best song of the concert was an absolutely killer version of “Digging in the Dirt,” which had a nasty, funky, bass-heavy sound to it. There’s not a version with great sound on YouTube, so this will have to do:

They also did an extremely good version of “Biko” as the final encore.

Here’s the set list, which seems to be constant across venues.

I think the last two shows of the tour are in Dallas tonight and Houston Saturday, and overall prices are a bit cheaper than the Austin show. It’s well worth catching if you’re a Gabriel fan.

As for the Moody Center, the sightlines are very good, the concession prices are exorbitant, and the seats are too small and not particularly comfortable.

Shoegazer Sunday: S.C.U.M.’s “Whitechapel”

Sunday, October 8th, 2023

I found this S.C.U.M. video in a list of Shoegaze videos, and I see them described as “Post-punk,” but what they sound like to me is 1980s-era Simple Minds. Here’s “Whitechapel.”

By the way, Simple Minds are still around and have a tour coming next year, but S.C.U.M. broke up in 2013.

Shoegazer Sunday: Collapse’s “Path”

Sunday, September 17th, 2023

Collapse is another obscure Japanese Shoegaze band. Or maybe not so obscure, since they already have ten albums and EPs out. Their earlier songs seem more My Bloody Valentine-influenced, but their later stuff seems a bit more Dreampop with a noisebed base, maybe Tokyo Shoegazer by way of The Cherry Wave and Civic with a soupcon of Asobi Seksu thrown in. Here’s “Path.”

Shoegazer Sunday: Slowdive’s “The Slab” (and first impressions of Everything is Alive)

Sunday, September 10th, 2023

Here’s “The Slab,” the final track from Slowdive’s new Everything is Alive album. But I should warn you that this is a case where the song of the CD is much stronger than the compressed version on YouTube:

I finally got the CD in this week, and I think it’s a very strong album, more consistent than their previous self-titled album, but only time will tell is something as strong as “Slomo” or “No Longer Making Time” emerges as particular favorites. (And the later only really twigged for me when it became such a burner live.)

40 Years Ago Today: Genesis Releases “Mama”

Saturday, August 19th, 2023

Forty years ago today, August 19, 1983, Genesis released their self-titled album (their twelfth), and “Mama” was the first single released off that.

As a fairly new convert to classic Prog Rock Genesis at the time, I wasn’t a fan of Genesis’ move toward more mainstream pop, but “Mama” caught my attention, as it’s a pretty interesting song. And far from being an average pop song, it was weird and sinister.

And it has perhaps the most memorable laugh in any song, ever.

Peter Gabriel-era Genesis had a lot more overtly sinister songs (“The Waiting Room” comes to mind), but “Mama” was distinctly different from Genesis’ 1980s output, or indeed, just about anything else on mainstream radio in 1983. Between the sparse drum loop, the eerie high synthesizer wash, and Collins’ urgent, hungry vocals about a young man’s unrequited love for a prostitute, it still has power four decades on.