For your Sunday dose of Shoegaze, here’s another shot of SPC ECO with “Fallen Stars.”
This is off their new album Sirens and Satellites, which I liked enough to buy. The overall sound features very pretty, very spacey background synthesizer washes with poppy tunes and understated female vocals somewhere between Florence + The Machine, Sarah McLachlan, and Tori Amos, with a dash of Yoko Kanno. The emotional feel of the album is a lot like Malory’s Outerbeats.
How long has it been since I featured an obscure Japanese Shoegazer band? Well that’s too long!
Here’s Bertoia‘s “Snow Slide,” which proves once again that low-rent costumes and dreamquest fantasies are a fine hook to hang a music video on…
Here’s “Faded Hearts,” another track from School of Seven Bells’ Put Your Sad Down EP. When I first listened to the EP, I kept skipping it because I didn’t like the sound of the first 15 seconds or so. But once you get past that it’s a really engaging song. And Alejandra Deheza still has a great voice.
The music for both this and “Put Your Sad Down” are both sort of pop-electronica on the surface, but lyrically and emotionally, both are dealing with the same affecting subject matter: how to convince someone who’s dying to keep living.
Stumbled across this cover of Genesis’s “Entangled” off Trick of the Tail by a band called Hydria while looking for something else, and liked it enough to put it up.
It’s a crunchier, almost power ballad version, which actually works quite well for the song.
Here’s “Innocent,” another track of Japanese band Civic‘s debut album Toilet Monster.
Civic gets compared to Supercar, and while I can hear the resemblance, Civic has a rawer sound, like a garage band who just started meshing a few weeks ago. I like that high energy rawness, and some have labeled Civic “Noise Pop,” if that’s a real thing.
I’ve found and ordered Toilet Monster from a domestic source, and I hope to have a more detailed report if/when it comes in.
Since I have a lot of weird dreams, and remember the Mellotron from Genesis, I was already inclined to like Dead Mellotron‘s “Weird Dreams.”
Honestly, the only thing I know about Jesus on Heroine is that they have a Facebook page. Here’s the slightly differently spelled “Jesus on Heroin.” It’s probably best I didn’t play this on easter Sunday…
The Cherry Wave is a shoegaze band out of Glasgow that specializes in fuzzy walls of reverb. Here’s “Blush” off the EP of the same name.
You can buy the EP for whatever you think fair off BandCamp.
If you’ve ever wondered what the worst professionally recorded and released song in history is, wonder no more!
It’s “John John Let’s Hope for Peace” by Yoko Ono, John Lennon and The Plastic Ono Band off Live Peace in Toronto 1969:
Think of it less as a piece of music than as a way to clear the room at the end of a party…
Given that Popes John Paul II and John XXIII were canonized as saints today, here’s Adorable’s “I’ll Be Your Saint”. Never mind that they’re more Dreampop than Shoegaze, or that I’ve already done a Shoegazer Sunday post; two posts for two saints!