Legendary film score composer Ennio Morricone has died at age 91. The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, John Carpenter’s The Thing and The Hateful Eight all had scores by him, among the 500+(!) he composed.
Here’s probably my favorite piece by him, from his soundtrack to Once Upon A Time In The West:
This is from Deserta ‘s new album Black Aura My Sun, which is already making a lot of people’s “Best Shoegaze albums of 2020” list. They remind a little bit of Highspire.
Here’s a pleasant one off the Saint Marie Records Static Daydream sampler.
Ringo Deathstarr is a Shoegaze band that on paper I should like more than I do. An Austin band with redheaded female bassist? I should be all over that. But for some reason they’ve never really clicked with me.
But they just dropped a new, self-titled album, and this track sounds like a homage to not only Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage,” but also The Beatles at their most psychedelic.
I picked up SPC ECO’s Fifteen album, and if you like sort of steady-state, trancy shoegaze with beautiful female vocals sort of floating on top, I recommend it. Here’s “The Heart and Soul”:
I’d never heard Sara Rachele before I went looking for covers of “Fade Into You.” She’s good enough to provide a close approximation of Hope Sandoval’s voice. The arrangement is more sparse and lonely than the Mazzy Star original, accentuating the sad, twangy, “coming home from a honky tonk alone at 3 AM” vibe of the song.
David Roback, half of duo Mazzy Star, has died at age 61. He co-wrote their one hit, the haunting “Fade Into You”:
Mazzy Star got called Shoegaze because there wasn’t anything else to call them, but their twangy guitar sound, and Hope Sandoval’s breathy, honey-and-bourbon vocals, were like nothing else on the scene.
Like last week’s selection, “All We Have Is Now” is off Static Waves 5. It’s a beautiful, echoey piece of steady state Shoegaze:
Between this and The Capsules, the Static Wave compilations aren’t so much introducing me to new bands as presenting new work from bands I already liked but hadn’t tracked closely enough.
I just picked up Static Waves 5 from Saint Marie Records, and this is one of the best songs off it:
There’s simply something very pleasing about Julie Shields harmonizing with herself…
As a guy who only owns Moving Pictures, I’m not the right person to talk about the passing of Rush drummer Neil Peart. So instead, here’s every Rush reference in Mystery Science Theater 3000:
(Dwight already posted all the Archer references, though I think that video is missing an incarnation or two Krieger’s van.)