I can’t decide whether Alcest is Shoegaze, Depressive Metal, or some offshoot of the RenFaire school of ProgRock (more long-forgotten French prog band Manticore than Jethro Tull). Here’s “Beings of Light,” which features a female lead singer rather the usual metal “screaming with a mouthful of gravel” that seems to have become standard in the genre, which they do on some of their other songs.
Whatever it is, it’s interesting enough to be worth a listen.
The Meetings Places are a California shoegaze band that include former member’s of Alison’s Halo (a fine pedigree). Here’s the pleasant, ethereal “Now I Know You Could Never Be The One,” which sounds a bit like some of Slowdive’s pre-Just for a Day material.
School of Seven Bells are a band from New York City named after the mythical pickpocket school. They started out as a trio and are now down to a duo. “My Cabal” was evidently their first single, and is a pleasant, dreampop-y sort of number.
Blind Mr. Jones was a UK Shoegazer band from the early 1990s. “Mesa” is from their second and last album, Tatooine. Since they broke up right after it’s release, presumably they were not the shoegaze droids the public was looking for…
The High Violets hail from Portland, Oregon. Here’s “X-Tasy Monopoly,” where the lead sunger sounds a bit like a Red Dirt Girl-era Emmylou Harris, which is no bad thing.
So a while back I posted a couple of songs from Laboratory Noise’s debut album When Sound Generates Light. Then I went to buy the album, found a CD cheap on Amazon, put it in my basket, and then got busy with something. The next day when I went to check out, the price had gone from something like $3 to something like $20.
Then it slipped my mind until I found it cheap on Amazon again and finally picked it up. Now I’ve had a chance to listen to it.
The verdict?
This is a tremendously strong Shoegaze album. Certainly the best I’ve heard since Midsummer’s Into the Trees, and possibly the best since Slowdive’s Just for the Day, my Shoegaze Alpha and Omega. Every song on it is at least good, and even the one song I didn’t care for the beginning of turns (“Earthrise”) beautiful about halfway through.
Here’s “I Can Only Give You Everything,” but any shoegaze fan should pick this up.
It’s that good.
They also have a new EP out that’s next on my listening list.
Austin’s own Experimental Aircraft are another band in the shoegaze/psychedelia/post-rock netherworld.
“Meet Me on Echo Echo Terrace” is from their album Third Transmission off Graveface records, run by Ryan Graveface of Dreamend and Black Moth Super Rainbow.
One caveat: They seem to have the same video (or variations thereof) for all the songs on this album.
UK’s Engineer’s deftly tread the boarders of Shoegaze, Dream Pop, and Psychedelia on “Clean Colored Wire.”
Ulrich Schnauss (who seems to be to shoegaze keyboard what Tony Levin is to progressive rock bass) is also part of the current incarnation of the band.
If they were from Australia rather than Sweden, I would think that A Swarm of the Sun was A Beautiful Machine reborn, so close is the very heavy shoegaze sound.
Drifter is a practitioner of minimalist, almost steady state shoegaze, with one riff repeated over and over again for the entire length of the song. But, by and large, they’re the right riffs.
And check out their previous Shoegazer Sunday entry “Fade” if you haven’t already.