After posting last week’s Tokyo Shoegazer song, I did some more research, and it seems that Shoegaze is (thankfully) a lot more popular in Japan than I first realized.
Here’s a band named Supercar (which evidently broke up in 2005) with “Lucky.” Here they seem a little more J-Pop than Shoegazer, but either way they’re very tasty. Skip the first 42 seconds of cheesetacular introduction.
And here’s the live version:
I was poking around YouTube looking for more Shoegazer songs when I came across “Bright” from Tokyo Shoegazer, an accurate and wonderfully self-referential name.
That’s only part of the song; the full track comes in at 8 minutes and 19 seconds of reverb-and-sustain drenched fuzzy, blissed-out shoegaze goodness.
That track is off of their debut album 「crystallize」, which evidently just came out November 23. For once I’m not ten years behind the curve! All the tracks are available on iTunes. I’ve already picked up “Bright” (which hits very close to the heart of my Shoegazer sweet spot, which is still Slowdive’s Just for a Day), and may end up buying the rest.
Even if you’re not a Shoegazer fan, you have to admit that this collection of guitar effects peddles on the album cover is impressive:
Back in the late 1990s, as I was looking around for some non-Slowdive Shoegazer music to listen to, I started looking through the late, lamented MP3.com. (It’s still around, but not nearly as good or important as it used to be.) One of the things I found was the EP Catch and Blur by an American Shoegazer band called Midsummer. After a long hiatus, Midsummer released a very strong album called Inside the Trees in 2008, which is well worth checking out on iTunes, etc. They fall somewhere on the “Shoegazer/Post-rock/Progressive Rock/Hey it’s music and I like it so stop trying to label it” continuum.
Here’s “Where the Waves,” which is on the poppy-side of Shoegazer, but is still I think a very good song.
Recently I’ve been getting into the band Asobi Seksu which, despite the name, is based in New York. Their first two albums, the self-titled debut and Citrus, are both worthy of interest. “Stay” is off the first album:
The first time I listened to it, I thought it too lounge jazzish, but at about the 3:20 mark, one of the most awesome shoegazer guitar solos ever kicks in.
Other Asobi Seksu tracks worth checking out are “Thursday” and “Walk on the Moon.”
So I’ve been meaning to do some sort of comprehensive post on my love of obscure Shoegazer bands. But instead of one big post, I’ve decided to start parceling out little nuggets of Shoegazer goodness every Sunday.
If you’re unfamiliar with Shoegazer music, think of reverb-and-sustain-drenched guitars backing songs drifting between the poles of rock, pop, and ambient, with a little prog and psychedelia thrown in for good measure.
We start off with Slowdive, which is actually one of the least obscure shoegazer bands out there. I first heard “Catch the Breeze” on WHFS the one year I spent in the DC area. (Actually. WHFS was one of the few things that didn’t suck about living up there.) Later on I picked up Just for a Day, which I’ve always thought of as the definitive Shoegazer album. (I’ve never been able to get into My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, despite my best intentions. Maybe it’s the screechy, annoyingly high-pitched sounds scattered on many of the tracks. Or maybe it’s the sonic quality that sounds like someone recorded the entire thing in a bathtub on a Realistic cassette recorder after they’d dropped it down a stairwell a few times using factory-second Certron tapes.) Of the songs off that, “Primal” has long been my favorite, as it has a perfect, wistful descending chord progression at the start. But I haven’t found a good video for that.
Instead, here’s “Shine.” This is a pre-Just For a Day songs off one of their early EPs.
Interestingly enough, there’s another fine Shoegazer song called “Shine” (also not available as an embeddable video) from the short-lived band Lowsundays. I prefer the short version off the Projekt Spring 2001 Sampler.