Continental Drift
I’d read somewhere that a book called Hearing History: A Reader, edited by the promisingly Fall-esquely named Mark M. Smith, explored the distinction between “American sound” and “European sound”. This got me all excited and I chased down the book. Disappointingly, though, it turned out that the relevant chapters were not really about the similarities […]
Soon: You Walk Through Walls
The warm, crepuscular tones of You Walk Through Walls’ self-titled new album evoke a tender and reassuring yet somehow distant domesticity, like photos of friends and family pinned onto the fridge or letters written to loved ones back home from a mildly adventurous yet personally significant trip. The London-based band includes two former Air Formation members, […]
Soon: Stagnant Pools
“Maintain Consistency,” implored the guitarist and vocalist Bryan Enas on Temporary Room, the 2012 album he recorded with his brother, drummer Doug Enas. Stagnant Pool’s debut was a highly promising affair, a richly textured yet obdurately minimalist testimony to pain sung through pursed lips. Ironically, though, while the Indiana duo’s album was graced with some […]
The Space Interpreters
In tribute to the Germany footballer Thomas Müller, winner of the Golden Boot at the last world cup and one of the leading scorers at the current one, I thought I’d look at the treatment of space in some recent shoegaze releases. When once asked to list his best attributes, Müller described himself as a Raumdeuter – […]
Soon: Aerofall
Aerofall are a band from the Russian port city of Rostov-on-Don who carve their own compelling niche on the ever-fertile line between noise experimentalism and dream pop. Their guitars are tuneful, overdriven and anarchically feedback-drenched. Their exhilarating racket sounds like a less angsty Ice Age, The Jesus and Mary Chain without the snarl, A Place to […]
Music of the Future
In a suitably snowy Montreal I went to see “No Foreign Lands”, an exhibition of paintings by Peter Doig, one of contemporary art’s most shoegazy painters. Here are two of the paintings Doig made in the early 1990s, the heyday of densely blurry, snowflakily-distorted, edging-towards-abstraction and almost-at-the-point-of-dissolution guitar music: Doig’s paintings are typically based on […]