Alsion’s Halo was evidently among the first American band to respond to the first wave of Manchester-base Shoegazer, forming in Arizona in 1992.
Evidently the stopped recording for a while, then reformed as a band called Lochheed (sic), which sounds more ambient.
Two names that are not otherwise paired together.
Tony Banks, the keyboardist for Genesis (and, with Mike Rutherford, the only member through all the band’s lineups) is 62 today. In celebration, here’s a live version of “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”:
Director Tarantino turns 49 today, which gives me a chance to talk about his film Django Unchained, an antebellum slave revenge fantasy that looks like looks like a cross between Mandingo and, well, Kill Bill. No trailer yet, but since it’s Tarantino, we know won’t be screwed up by any of that annoying political correctness. Also, damn, look at that cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Kurt Russell, Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx, James Remar (Dexter’s dad), Don Johnson (in the “Designated John Travolta Career Resurrection Role”), Sacha Baron Cohen, and Leonardo DiCaprio as the bad guy.
I fully expect it to rock.
Welsh trio The Joy Formidable offers up dense shoegaze textures with poppy hooks, sort of like a cross between between Siouxie and the Banshees and Adorable.
Since they’re been on Letterman, I guess they’re hardly a secret…
Here’s a live version of Japanese threesome Lemon’s Chair song “Sonar.” It starts off as some very pleasant noodling, and then more than halfway in transforms into a sonic wall of sound that never quite loses the central groove.
They also have a nice solid slab of steady-state shoegazer sweetness called “Swallowtail” on iTunes, but there doesn’t seem to be a version of that on YouTube.
Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” is the music Bruce Sterling would put on at the end of the party after every Turkey City Writer’s Workshop held at his house, mainly so people would leave. It worked too, not because it was bad, but because the waltz tempo, echoey steel guitar and smoky vocals make it the perfect “chill out at the end of a long day and feel your eyelids getting heavy” song. I bought the single off iTunes, but I think I might need to pick up the entire album, So Tonight That I Might See, as I’ve developed a craving for Hope Sandoval’s voice, which combines that smokey, chill tone of a classic jazz/blues chanteuse with peak-period Sinatra’s last-second, end-of-the-measure timing.
Is Mazzy Star shoegazer? I think they’re more sui generis, but I’ve seen “Fade Into You” on several Best of Shoegazer lists, and that’s good enough for me…
Flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond theme:
This was done at Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science‘s Vijay Kumar, Daniel Melligner and Alex Kushleyev. The quadrotors are under computer control.
It’s not a particularly good version, but I’m sure they’ll have time to improve before the final enslavement of humanity. Now you’ll have to excuse me, I have to write a quadrotor heist novel…
(Hat tip: Derek Johnson)
I’m not nearly as big a fan of Slowdive’s Souvlaki as I am of their debut album Just For A Day, but “Machine Gun” is my favorite off of Souvlaki.
This piece has a lot going for it, even beyond the alteration, though I could do without the bit of black metal growling in the middle. Solines evidently hails from Denmark.
It reminds me a bit of the half of System of a Downs’ “Toxicity” that didn’t suck.
Just got back from a business trip, so it’s going to take me a few days to get up to speed. So here’s a tune from classic UK Shoegazer band Ride.
Like Supercar, Plastic Girl in Closet is another Japanese band treading the boundary between Shoegaze and J-Pop. Also like Supercar, their dress sense seems to come from The Beatles circa 1964.