recommend me some lost shoegaze classics

Though I'm sure Ned will be here soon to "sort us out". ;-)

Drop Nineteens - Delaware
Lilys - In The Presence of Nothing
The first Henry's Dress album
For Against, perhaps?

Other than that, go and get Piano Magic's 'Low Birth Weight'.

Medicine!

Maybe not 100% shoegaze, but close enough...
The Cranes
Curve
Bleach
Swirlies

Bleah, feh. Ditto Catherine Wheel. Though Curve had their moments. Cranes were interesting, but not exactly Shoegazer.

Gah, there were a lot of dire Shoegazer bands, weren't there?

Anyone for early Moose or the Telescopes or even the Swirlies?

secret shine, smashing orange, medicine (and later on, alisons halo)

Justin referred to them in his original message (Sonny + Sam)

Me, I can't believe that no-one has mentioned Kitchens of Distinction yet. No, scratch that, actually I can.

That's The Lollies, Kate - don't you remember anything? ;-)

Everyone's mentioned everything I remember from then, and some more, but this thread is most useful for my hopefully forthcoming shoegazeish night in Bethnal Green.

Ooh, what about Dr Phibes & The House Of Wax Equations? I'm sure I liked that album at one point. Anyone gonna burn me a copy of Gala then? Pretty please...

Dammit, you people have already covered things pretty well, what's left! Even Clairecords got a mention!

Though there's actually room to address some stuff that is gaze influenced that doesn't exactly follow the formula. Flowchart's Cumulus Mood Twang is one of the best things to follow in the wake of Loveless that captures, indeed, mood without simply trying to recreate. Meanwhile, the good Spencer Chow and Job de Wit pointed out to me a slew of recent techno efforts from Europe which also reflect that interest -- M83 was enjoyable enough, but I liked the Ulrich Strauss (I think that's his last name?) effort more. Good to see Rob mentioning the Charlottes -- when it comes to earlier bands, Closedown out here in California created a lovely album, Nearfield, that while very gaze/Cure influenced was remixed in studio to try and emphasize a more zoned out New Age approach at the behest of their label, Silent. So while flawed, it's still worth a listen.

Someone else has GOT to remember this.

I can't do links so... http://www.evo.org/html/group/lillies.html

http://www.live365.com/stations/glove7?play

(God, I am pathetic that I remember these sorts of things)

Another great band often overlooked is Half-String from Arizona. They put out several discs on IPR. A Fascination With Heights is the strongest in my book, with "Momentum" being my favorite amongst a strong set of songs.

Boston act the Curtain Society were on Bedazzled, their second disc Life Is Long Still is a bargain bin staple and worth the small change for the opener "Mouthwithout" ... perhaps one of my favorite opening riffs of a shoegaze song ever.

Another not mentioned is Alison's Dress (their comp was on Burnt Toast, "Torn is my fave).

I have a shoegaze CD-R I made for myself, if anyone wants a copy just drop me a note. Contains all the above and Ropers, All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors, An April March, Revolver, Belltower and others mentioned above.

How 'bout the first two Straitjacket Fits records, if we're looking to Flying Nun type stuff? The first one especially is great...

You mean Alison's Halo. Since we're out here, Love Spirals Downwards' second album is a 'gazing classic in my book, it's called Ardor.

The Secret Shine compilation CD should be out soon, you won't go wrong with that.

Sugar Plant's most shoegazing album is probably Trance/Mellow, somewhere close to Slowdive's Souvlaki. Their first two albums are more in the Galaxie 500 vein... After After Hours is classic.

double recommendation for Swervedriver's first album.

I would also put in a small shout for Verve's early singles, Gravity Grave, She's a Superstar and All In the Mind. In fact, the whole of the Storm in Heaven album was the tail end of shoegazing-type music for me, and reminds me what a beautiful band they were before they went shit. Although they weren't really shoegazers per se, it fitted in with what I was listening to at the time.

Two of the bigger local labels were Mind Expansion Records & Burnt Hair Records- some of the local acts included Fuxa, Windy & Carl (who run a nice indie record shop in Dearborn - Stormy Records), Miss Bliss, Tomorrowland (more ambient/idm, but in the same local scene), His Name is Alive, Auburn Lull, & Transient Waves (outta Philly but w/ ties to the Michigan scene).

Other related stuff was coming out around the US as well from the likes of Darla Records & Kranky Records, and groups like Hopewell (members of Mercury Rev), Jessamine, Bowery Electric, etc, etc..

bona-fide classic, absolutely! i never tire of this wonderful record, which recreates dreamlike strolls in rainy cities like few others have done. their later garage-mod output is...interesting, but i never listen to it much. are half-string or curtain society anything like toulouse?

I wouldn't have automatically thought of Levitation as shoegazers either, but someone else did upthread (I wouldn't describe them as also-rans either).

i'd call them "indie-rock" but those more genre-centric may refer to them as "slow-core".

still extant bands out here:
Color Wall, from LA
The Jealous Type, from Ann Arbor, MI
The Flashing Astonishers, from i ferget where

oh yeah, and the Dykehouse album, when it finally comes out.

The comp that comes with the new issue is really really good.

Other Medicine-influenced California-based shoegazers of note: The Lassie Foundation.

Apart from them, burn the rest except MBV obviously.

mention of IPR is OTM - an amazing label. everything i buy on that label is a gem of shoegazing or Factory/4AD influenced wonderment.

One of my all-time favourites.

Mogwai
GYBE!
(some) Mercury Rev
Sigur Ros

Do Lorelei count too? Their early singles were pretty shoegazey. And the Moon Seven Times?

Half-String have the right tone but not as many hooks and the singer is slightly more mopey. Curtain Society have the hooks but are more crisp than Toulouse. I definitely recommend Half-String's A Fascination With Heights.

And everyone who praised the Ropers as one of the best groups of all time is unequivocably correct. Don't forget the early singles, handily compiled on the s/t ep. Does anyone here have the Boyracer/Ropers tour split 7" ... I've been dying to hear that song for years.

I have the Whipping Boy album (Heartworm) and consider When We Were Young as one of the great lost singles of all time, but in no way on this earth would I ever have thought of them as shoegazers.

i have that, somewhere in the deep recesses of my vinyl stacks. i'll have a look for it. it's a nice track..

reminds me... guitar "sunkissed" by morr... what if the sneaker pimps did a shoegaze record?
m.

http://www.gamerseurope.com/whippingboy/downloads.htm

Oh, there's far worse bands out there. I saw Duster and Hovercraft play an in-store in the mid 90s and they were pleasant enough.

How 'bout Creation era Telescopes....amazing.

Is there a decent book or article out there that gets into how shoegaze came about, where it came from, etc.? Or do I just have to prepare a list of questions for Ned to answer?

HI THERE

Something like Blissed Out gives a sense of some of the rhetorical claims at the time, but only from one person, after all. Even so, Simon Reynolds did help codify a lot of the language used to discuss it so you can't quite escape him on that front.

A larger perspective would have to go into a lot more -- that MBV in 1988 were synthesizing everything from Sonic Youth to Public Enemy to the Beach Boys to etc. etc. gives a sense of it, but at the same time it's not like they were the only band interested in those performers, and they certainly did not set out to go 'oh yeah let's create a genre called shoegaze,' any more than Bauhaus formed by thinking, "So, let's create goth." You'd have to also include other contemporary bands seen as allies or fellow travellers or what have you.

David Cavanagh's My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize talks about Creation more than shoegaze-as-such but there's a huge overlap by default. Mike McGonigal's 33 1/3 entry on Loveless goes into MBV's history. Again, too limited by half in terms of a truly encompassing study but still...

I know you asked about books but I want to recommend a lost shoegaze classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GJ9IhY6BpE

Ah, good starting points. Thanks Ned. I didn't know there was a Creation book.

Oh yeah, read that one immediately -- Alan McGee hated it, calling it the 'accountant's story' or something similar, but he is so ridiculously wrong (and also is completely trying to hide any take on his former label that can't be summed up as 'yeah I was this wild and crazy RAWK guy trashing the man every chance I get!' -- I mean god bless the guy for doing what he did at all, obv., but he's long been caught up in his own mythmaking).

I will!

The reason I'm even thinking about it is I started thinking about the aesthetic of obscured or effaced vocals. It didn't exactly start with shoegaze (and definitely didn't end with it) but that seems to be the genre that really embraced it. I've been going through my collection thinking about the antecedents to the style.

the aesthetic of obscured or effaced vocals

FYI this is a totally different subject than shoegaze!

Kinda like saying, "Is there an article about how shoegaze came about? I started thinking about the aesthetic of distorted, woozy guitar sounds..."

Which would be another perfectly apropos line of inquiry. But pgwp's topic seems like the more interesting one.

Yeah I recognize it's a bigger subject than shoegaze and thought I said as much. There are lots of avenues to go down and shoegaze is definitely one of them.

the just-reissued ashrae fax 'static crash' ep has some pretty special moments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyXicOwLriI

Really looking forward to this, as are the other 5 or 6 of you that bought the Still In A Dream box set!

https://thirdmanrecords.com/news/third-man-records-announces-southeast-of-saturn

https://third-man-records.imgix.net/d7eb161a-9098-4296-ad82-0a29e344dae3/unnamed.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=min&fm=jpg&q=80&rect=0%2C0%2C1200%2C1137

This looks really cool, thanks!

Here's one, a bonus Teenage Filmstars track. Hits the spot!! Amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec9RQrUAOYU

Just been listening to All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors (of whom three members guest on the incredible Dalek track Forever Close My Eyes) - Turning Into Small is a lovely album!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG4u0LR8nzo

I love that album and the band comes from a very middle of nowhere wooded town in a part of north New Jersey that you would only expect to hear dueling banjos. I was so flabbergasted that a top tier shoegaze band of all things came from there. I grew up a town away.

I love that band, & I had no idea they were from rural north New Jersey. That endears them to me even more, having grown up in Warren Co.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ce/09/bd/ce09bddec81ad6e0540aa1c59eda5090.jpg

[faint sounds of shoegaze in the distance]

aw <3

Not 100% gaze, but very much classic and perhaps a little overlooked -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA1qeKFQMIg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOOxUz7sXBY

Love Straightjacket Fits! What was the 2nd one supposed to be?

Maresn3st have you heard that Teenage Filmstars track I posted? Scratches an early Lilys / Drop Nineteens / Swervedriver itch for me.

Maresn3st have you heard that Teenage Filmstars track I posted? Scratches an early Lilys / Drop Nineteens / Swervedriver itch for me.

Yea!!! Love it, I got kinda Swirlies top notes from it too

The second YT? It's just another SF tune, Down in Splendour, Andrew Brough was def the gaze end of the band.

Ah OK cool; it's broken on my end.

Yeah definitely Swirlies too but they were always so focused, and to me this track has that zoned out feeling the bands I cited had the tendency to do, where it sounds like they're lost in the bliss of the chord changes and aren't guaranteed to snap out of it.

don't know their catalog well enough to know if they pulled out more like this one, but...

outrageous cherry, "if someone loves you"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hDKDkSLOw

It's been awhile since I listened to anything else by them but I LOVE that album in particular

always loved the first smashing orange album. it is very derivative but all the same, it fucking rocks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HNOeXDHDaU

Me too. Someone taped stuck a few of their songs on the end of bootleg tape of a Ride concert for me in the summer of 91. I then spent a few hopeless months going into record shops trying to find anything by them and repeatedly being asked "Don't you mean Smashing Pumpkins?" until I gave up. I eventually found an album of theirs in 1993 which had at least one of the tracks from that tape on it (Not Very Much To See), but mysteriously had a very different version of My Deranged Heart on it. Another year passed and then I finally tracked down another album that had the 'proper' version on it. I don't actually know which of those albums came out first and I assume the group had split up long before I actually finally managed to buy them.

(A quick visit to discogs later) Weirdly it seems that both the albums I bought were released in 1991, but that the four songs originally taped for me were the A-sides and B-sides of two singles also released in 1991 (that also featured on the albums).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeSvPNFe6bg

john peel used to play 'my deranged heart' and 'only complete in you'. they did actually survive until 1995-ish, they got signed to MCA in the big clamour for alt-rock bands and put out one last album that totally stiffed afaict. all their stuff is supercheap on the cogs now

Love Smashing Orange! Everybody is pointing out my favorite bands this is great

This feels like something Ned would like?

Anyway, this was circulated for years on blogs but I recently stumbled on this OFFICIAL download complete with the cassette artwork and this was exciting for me.

FREE DOWNLOAD, too!

https://washperth.bandcamp.com/album/wash

Huh, wonder what their deal was.

Obviously I don't have much info, but I heard they once opened for Swervedriver (in Australia where they're from). I do wonder why they didn't happen...

This tape is great though. Glad it exists. More people need to hear it.

Bumping because: see above post

Also I crave engagement (needy as usual) and am currently hopped up on music discoveries

Like this incredible one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjIzmQ1BGYM

This one kind of a Lorelei mixed with early Lilys, early Swirlies & early Polvo sound! Winner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uoCdmGIouw

This band is great too:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=OLAK5uy_k4Km8ZWlJyZE9BXcF3bsyG3sZHs6Iwlqk

It's Mean Red Spiders. For some reason that link used the app interface or whatever

Hey, thanks for the heads up on that Wash album!

You’re welcome!

Yeah that's a damn good listen.

Ned - question for you - that band I posted above "Study of the Lifeless". I'm having a heckuva time finding concrete info about their 2nd album "World Revolves Around You". I presume it must have released on CD but the internet weirdly has no evidence of this. Do you know?

https://www.allmusic.com/album/world-revolves-around-you-mw0000986965

(btw someone made wild guesses with those "style" tags... way off)

very weird hearing Filosofem by Burzum for the first time in the mid 90s and hearing the guitars on there. If you didn't hear the harshg vocals I think Shoegaze is very much what you would be thinking.
JUst checking this now and yeah definitely what I'm hearing.

xpost Hm, couldn't tell you. One of those turn-of-the-millennium bands keeping the sound going as they could. Had almost forgotten about them!

Pluramon 2003 & 2007 albums
Luminous orange 1999 ep

Dang I guess I'll need to keep digging

xp

Ultra Cindy!

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP-LgxRc_GDxbibbpTVGDJoAvv0fmk-Z7&themeRefresh=1

Another Heaven is great for nugaze

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgv9n8ApQbs

Just noticed that Fleeting Joys are active again
https://fleetingjoys1.bandcamp.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGVZTe5XOAE

It's fairly well known but I don't see it mentioned enough outside Rateyourmusic: The Angel Pool by The Autumns is really gorgeous, can't recommend it highly enough, and the singer is the opposite from 99% of vocalists in the genre.

The Autumns - The Angel Pool
Sianspheric - (first two albums)
Teenage Filmstars - Star

two great bands with mostly same lineup:
Polar - A Future History Of The frigid Polar Night
Polar - Lies Set By The Polar Mob
Con Dolore - This Sad Movie

The third album This Sad Movie is particularly amazing.

Another vote for Alison's Halo - Eyedazzler

Alison's Halo have been working on a kind of wrap EP for, well, years now (not a complaint, I think they're just fitting it among other things, pandemic, etc.). Backed it a while back and seems like it should be coming out this year.

Didn't they have a new name like Locheed? I'm sure there was a new band coming from the duo?

this?

https://www.discogs.com/release/1600577-The-Pastry-Heros-Horn-Rim-Fury-EP

It was in the myspace era and there might have even been sample tracks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMOxlsKu3Ak

A lot of gems on the Eastern European Shoegaze channel, like Bizarre from Estonia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIT-omWhX7Q

This instant-classic from the Netherlands I heard for the first time last week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp20s51w0Cs

^ The Nightblooms - Never Dream At All

Same song, more noise. Take your pick:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcpdIFZgAz8

Secret Shine - Toward the Sky:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om-KCC4GRyQ

I love both versions of Never Dream At All, long time fan of the Nightblooms

Maybe more dreamy than shoey, but anilore (Hudson valley/Brooklyn) got back together, reissued their 90s record, and put out 2 new things that keep the original flames alive w much fancier pedal boards

https://anilore.bandcamp.com/album/still-awake

ArchCarrier - I discovered Bizarre's Beautica on a shoegaze forum and I was very fond of it at the time, nice to see it's been reissued but still no CD

Anilore sounds good, new to me

Yes, same here!

On the Secret Shine tip, I've been really loving Dreamscape this week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zNabzf8POw

Truly a very lost classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0cffRUsuxg

I don't think Polar made anything quite as good as Con Dolore's This Sad Movie (I still consider both Polar albums very great) but this is one of my favorite Polar songs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEYL28yFgtE

I could swear the singer had another band going after with tracks on Myspace, she was fantastic

The new Pencey Sloe album strikes me as a future lost shoegaze classic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLv0P5dKClA

Okay so wayyyyy back on this thread a few of us were talking about Australia's Gaslight Radio, who had shoegaze in their makeup if not totally that. They've recently put up a best of on Spotify and a slightly older one on Bandcamp -- worth checking out:

https://gaslightradio.bandcamp.com/album/best-of-gaslight-radio-1996-2006

https://open.spotify.com/album/13LPSQCsi5BNXoCQhMFASl

Difference Engine quietly released their shelved 1994 album Flex Lavender on streaming services last year, with no accompanying info and no mention of a forthcoming physical release 🤔. it's less Disco Inferno and more Stereolab (at least on the Margie-sung tracks) than Breadmaker) and veers into trip-hop-gaze on the last track. imo the first six tracks + the intro of 'Sky Hutch' would have made for one of the best EPs of the era. it gets a little more pedestrian after that but it's solid enough throughout

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osSfzmpyEoI

listened to alison’s halo — eyedazzler last week an had a revelation I haven’t had since the pre-spotify days. why is no one talking about this band?? incredible record

Yeah, "Snowbleed" is incredible

Indeed! I'm delighted they're touring -- seeing them in a month here in SF! They've been working on a new EP for literal years now -- supported the Kickstarter pre-pandemic -- but seeing them live at last is what I'm especially here for.

oh hi thread, this is an early 90's thing that just got released:

https://transpacific-us.bandcamp.com/album/transpacific

Early 2000s surely, based on the liner notes.

And hey, ex-ILXor donut bitch just now reminded me those guys had a track on the very great Hall of Mirrors comp in the mid-2000s -- the only release of theirs at the time, I think!

ah OK, I was mixing it up with those guys' earlier band, Dose

Hey I recorded at Avast! (Braggin)

since they don’t have a thread (and my post might have been the first mention on this board?), just want to say “eyedazzler” from alison’s halo is still in rotation for me. “snowbleed” -> “torn” is such a 1-2 punch

I was lucky enough to see them the other week and lemme tell ya, that was worth the thirty-year plus wait! Great band.

I saw them a few times the first time around and I love that they're seemingly bigger now.

Really sucks that the Con Dolore/Polar members didn't seem to do much more afterwards, Kristy Moss in particular, one of my favorite singers in the genre, I can't remember the name of her band on Myspace but I doubt there were any actual releases

Hey all 90s shoegaze heads, give this one a listen!!

https://beatriceblinded.bandcamp.com/album/stars-for-our-ceiling

Existing outside of definition in an indefinable time, beatrice blinded was an independent band in Ithaca, New York for a few years in the early '90s. Sequestered to a degree in the perpetually misty melancholy of pre-Internet, college town life, this was the sound of young creative energy just barely aware of itself. There are muddled flashes of influence from the shoegaze and depressive singer/songwriter movements happening around the same time, but the end result is unrecognizable from any direct reference point, unspoiled by any ambition beyond simply trying to get the words out. --Fred Thomas

Long-obscured recordings from early '90s Upstate NY shoegaze-adjacent, emotionally grappling quintet- Akin to the lost sounds of Ozean, Moose, Ride's transitional experiments, Velocity Girl & lilys.

THIS BETTER BE GOOD. (I'm sure it's good.)

Uh oh, now I'm biting my nails waiting for the official Ned take

sounds like Lorelei!

Oh definitely! I should have thought of that, that's totally otm.

Speaking of - a couple months ago I finally found a copy of The Bitter Air 7", that's been on my want list for 15 years.

oh! I have that... I just put on the Asleep EP, so good

so good! The (original) LP is typically slept on a bit, it's not as good as those singles but I love it.

Also does anyone have:

Tom Is My Sugar - Tesserae

...digitally? I want to hear it so bad...

revive sounds like the slow Velocity Girl songs. not bad, but... not my thing.

Evan:

https://music.cliggo.com/artist/Tom_Is_My_Sugar/album/5839029-Tesserae

I feel like I’m street-teaming this 30-yr-old record this week (apologies) – but revisiting the Air Miami album via its recent reissue, I was struck by the super-cool, shoegaze-adjacent groove of Definitely Beachy… it sounds even better to me now than it did back in the day!

Thanks Steve!

Though it looks like that website is sourcing youtube videos of which there are only a smattering of songs.

Also I will mention only two of the four Beatrice Blinded songs are slow, but to each their own regardless!

all out of nails at this point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQhi4f7D1fM

Amusement Parks on Fire - Our Goal to Realize

Impatiently curious for the Ned take on Beatrice Blinded.

The only two truly LOST shoegaze classics I can think of at the moment, well of course Evan posted it upthread: Study Of the Lifeless

But the other is a fairly obscure one from Estonia which had quite a scene 18-20 years ago:

The Chance - The Way Your Mind Looks Through
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBIj4OTld0c

Ned, what was the volume level at the alison’s halo show like?

Nicely loud. :-D

ha. seeing them in boston next week. just wondering if it’s a facemelting MBV situation and I need to bring earplugs

always bring earplugs!