album reviews and other stuff
10/10
For some reason, even though it must have been about 15 years ago now, I still remember my first time being introduced to The Stone Roses. My dad had one of their best of CDs in the car glovebox (I believe The Complete Stone Roses, but I wouldn't put the house on it as I was six years old when this happened), and he said something to the extent of "without these lot, there'd be no Blur, Oasis, Arctic Monkeys, nothing!" and proceeded to skip straight to She Bangs the Drums, in a move that would end up changing the trajectory my music taste would take forever more.
Now, I love my dad, and we get on about quite a lot musically. But, equally, he is generally very set in his ways, and spouts a lot of opinions that I vehemently disagree with. This is the man who said Fontaines DC's "Favourite", one of the best songs of the 2020s, sounded "like it could be on a phone advert". This is the man who said he would rather listen to Paul Young than Neil Young (no offence Paul, I still love you). This is the man who insists that Depeche Mode's 'Songs of Faith and Devotion' is "an album that just makes me want to deliberately crash the car whenever a song from it comes on". In fairness, that last one was probably just to wind up my mum, but still - you get the point that we disagree on a lot.
Yet, going back to that extremely bold and potentially inflammatory statement he made about the impact of The Stone Roses, and I find myself hard pressed to disagree with a word of what he said. I think this is the single most important post-Beatles album when it comes to British music. It managed to spawn genres like britpop & baggy, it revolutionised how we perceived genres like jangle pop and neo-psych, and utterly set the stage for modern indie rock as we know it, with its blend of chiming guitars alongside some of the greatest pop songs that have ever been conceived.
Although, on that subject, let's just get to the elephant in the room and deal with the track on here that is the furthest from 'greatest pop song ever produced' territory. You all obviously know I'm referring to "Don't Stop", and whilst I still certainly wish it was replaced by the excellent single edit of "Elephant Stone", I'm hard pressed to say I even really hate this song anymore. If anything, I find it ballsy and fun - jamming a reversed, trippy mess of a song in between some of the catchiest guitar numbers you'll ever hear. It's like saying "yeah, we could put another brilliant song here, but we're just so good we can do whatever we want and you'll love it anyway". Rather annoyingly, the band are 100% right, and so I struggle to bring myself to skip it nowadays.
With that out the way (and with a brief mention to charming anti-royalist interlude ditty Elizabeth My Dear), everything else here might as well be a 'greatest hits' compilation for the band themselves, remaining so ludicrously consistent that I'm half convinced John Squire took some country style deal with the devil and sacrificed his soul (and, indeed, the band's ability to make anything good after this record) in exchange for becoming one of the greatest songwriters and guitar players to ever live, at least for a bit.
I mean, the album literally starts with "I Wanna Be Adored", one of the single greatest songs ever written. From that iconic bassline, to the dreamy guitar that envelops it all in this reverb-drenched sheen, to Ian Brown's carefree delivery of those self-absorbed lyrics, I struggle to come up with a single element of this song I would tweak in any way. Even the atmospheric intro serves as the perfect way to build tension before the record kicks off proper. The build before that final repetition of that chorus is just a magnificent end, climaxing as the guitars coalesce into this sea of indie rock perfection and feedback, with Ian's vocals slowly beginning to fade away in the background...
...only for the hi-hats of "She Bangs the Drums" to snap right back to attention with a sudden change of pace. From psychedelic, dreamy indie rock to pure jangle pop brilliance, this is one of the most happy, summery, loving guitar tracks I could name, and it is just as perfect as (yet equally completely different from) the exquisite opener. I dare anyone to name a better one-two punch on an album before or since, because for my money such a thing does not exist.
"Waterfall" slows it down a little, and brings the band's trademark dance influence to the front with Mani's addictive bassline (that is still one of my absolute favourites to play across any song, full stop). Couple that with funky solos courtesy of Squire (which, I promise you, we'll get back to), Reni's rock steady drumming and Ian's laid-back delivery of the cheeky anti-US lyricism, and you've got a recipe for a third instant classic in a row.
That opening trio is incredible in their own right, but I personally believe that every single individual track on this record (bar Don't Stop and EMD) would be any other band's most fondly beloved single. "Bye Bye Badman" is part hazy, jangly summer brilliance, part political tribute to the Paris 1968 socialist student rioters, part denouncing of general authoritariaism. "(Song for My) Sugar Spun Sister" then suddenly switches the tone to this gleeful, romantic, delightfully cheeky ("she's the candyfloss girl, he's the sticky fingered boy") tune, whilst still ruffling political feathers by alluding to MPs sniffing glue. It's raunchy and rebellious, but you don't even really realise it because you're so distracted by how pretty everything sounds.
Then "Made of Stone" kicks off, and the tone takes this sudden shift to a more sombre, brooding vibe, with lyrics referencing James Dean's untimely death in a car crash as the modulated guitar begins to snarl like never before in one of Squire's trademark flexes of skill, building up to the utter transcendence he'll demonstrate at the tail end of the album. "Shoot You Down" is another more subdued baggy number a la "Waterfall", but this time even more chilled and relaxed, providing a rare moment to breathe amongst muted guitar lines, and serving as the perfect juxtaposition for the closing two tracks, which themselves act as the most remarkable way to finish an album there has possibly ever been.
"This Is the One" is one of the most triumphant pop songs I've ever heard in my life. It starts slow and fairly subdued, mainly being powered by a dream pop style, trebly guitar, and a thick bassline that powers everything alone. As Ian's vocals describe the process of moving on after some failed relationship, layers of guitar begin to bring themselves into the song in droves, helping to build the energy in preparation for the outro. Things go back to subdued for the final chorus, before Reni's iconic pounding drum fill beckons in a cornucopia of echo and reverb-laden guitar squeals to come and invade the track, giving a vibe almost akin to the dreamier side of shoegaze in the song's dying moments and eliciting nothing but pure ecstasy from anyone who might happen to hear it. Phenomenal.
In fact, you might be a bit underwhelmed by the first half of closer "I Am the Resurrection" after all that. It's excellent, no doubt, particularly Ian's cocky swagger and delivery of those narcisstic but oh so emboldening lyrics which stand at the forefront of my mind whenever thinking about this album vocally. Still, after "This is the One" and its incredible outro, it feels like something's...missing, sort of. Even the lovely final verse, with the allusions to Christ-like status and how said words tie into forgiveness of those who've wronged you, doesn't really seem to get going. At least, until Mani comes back in for one final iconic bass-line, and suddenly the penny drops.
The final four minutes of "I Am the Resurrection" contains one of the single greatest guitar solos ever put to tape. A completely improvised jam, John Squire delivers on the guitar insanity he's been teasing you with for the whole album with this funky, cocky, atmospheric, engrossing playing that is so removed from everything you've heard on the album to this point, but you just can't bring yourself to end the album early because it's just too mindblowing and, dare I say, epic. Between this track and the solo from the 7 minute album version of "Love Is the Law" he later recorded with The Seahorses, there is no question in my mind as to the identity of my favourite guitar player of all time. Squire is a legend, as are the whole band (yes, even Ian, his delivery is too iconic here not to praise), and the album itself.
I don't know what more I can do to convince you to listen to it. It will change your life. This isn't even my favourite album of all time (it's certainly top 3, though) and yet the fact I can still wax lyrical about it for this long should tell you all you need to know.
Thanks, dad. Not sure where my taste would be without you showing me this record, but I don't really want to know.
8/10
As someone who was sadly born far too late to be even within spitting distance of living through the 90s, I'm still a bit perplexed as to how it's come to dominate my taste in music to such an extent. Normally, the answer to such a question would be parental influence. However, the blissful corner of the 90s which brings me the most joy, shoegaze, only really elicits confusion and occasional vague approval (ie. my mum saying she liked Kitchens of Distinction's "Drive that Fast") from them. No, somehow I just ended up obsessed with this genre entirely of my own volition, and Slowdive are the band that have cemented themselves firmly as my favourite band of all time as a result.
So, I've always found their starting point to be a rather fun one to go back to, to try and recapture the same sort of feelings that people must have experienced upon picking up this CD for the first time back in 1990 (or, I guess, on vinyl, since it wasn't completely dead by that point). In fact, they were probably more likely to be inclined to pick it up, considering this was one of the few releases by the band from their original run that contemporary music critics didn't immediately lambast - which feels equally cruel, an example of the tried and true music critic tendency to hype up (or at the very least praise) an artist, only to deal a crushing blow to them just as they're about to get into their creative stride.
The reason as to why they didn't criticise it? Well, it becomes fairly obvious right out of the gate. "Slowdive" not only fulfils the rather rare distinction of being both a band's eponymous song and the title track on a given record, but it's one of the single strongest pre-Loveless shoegaze tracks, without a doubt in my mind. It's still one of my favourites across the entire Slowdive discography even after becoming intimately acquainted with their whole catalogue, and I think I'm fairly justified in holding that opinion. The guitar tone on here isn't quite like anything else in the band's repertoire - the distortion beneath the layers of trademark ethereal reverb is far easier to pick out, with that utterly killer riff being the perfect opening statement for a band trying to burst onto the scene with as much energy as they can muster. Between that, the immense sounding power chords that swirl together in a sea of noise (whilst remaining distinctly palatable and far softer than contemporaries like My Bloody Valentine), and the gorgeous lyricism - "graceful birds will whisper as I sadly pass them by" being one of the most poignant lines on any shoegaze release - it's all here. An absolute stand out and the best start to their tenure on Creation the band could have manufactured.
Things take a bit of a slump once you get to "Avalyn I" though, in my opinion. The song is still very pretty, and has elements of that lovely yet soft distorted guitar that penetrates so well through the mix, but it's really lacking the energy of the opener. Those driving power chords are substituted for a post-rock drum build that never really reaches the heights you hope it would. It's not a bad song, no doubt about that, in fact this formula would essentially be the basis for some of their finest tracks across their early material (notably a lot of stuff from Just for a Day). I just feel like it doesn't live up to what the title track was teasing.
"Avalyn II" pulls it back to some extent, however. It reuses the instrumental from the prior track in its first half, however chooses to do away with Rachel's ethereal vocals in favour of extending the song into a wordless post-rock epic, which feels like an ancestor of the 'crescendocore' second wave of post-rock years before anyone had heard the name Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The fact this was pre-Laughing Stock is honestly rather absurd to me, and I really do quite appreciate how the increased length allows for further caverns of sound to open up with that piercing guitar, the removal of the vocal providing even more space for it to breathe as it entrances you into a state of delirium. It's a very pleasant way to bring the EP to a close, and whilst it's still nowhere near the level of the opener, this is certainly the stronger of the two Avalyn tracks in my opinion.
I think, ultimately, Slowdive's debut EP doesn't just serve nowadays as an artifact to look back upon, as much as it's fun for me to reminisce on a past I never got to live through. For plenty of artists, hearing this in 1990 must have been an incredible inspiration, and this EP really does things that are years and years ahead of its time. Not everything it does is necessarily perfect, and it can't really match the lofty heights it sets for itself with its opening minutes, but it's a release that remains just as fresh and lively 30 years later as it would have done back at the turn of that oh so creatively rich decade.
10/10
The only way I can really express my love for After the Night is by making vague, up-in-the-air comparisons to the other sorts of circumstances and feelings that the record as a whole reminds me of. It's like waking up from a dream you'd rather stay in forever. It's like falling in love on a cold winter's day. It's that feeling of desperately wishing you could anticipate your own future. It's every second of teen and young adult angst that there ever has been or ever will be, rolled up and smothered by a blanket of the most fiery, passionate, abrasive yet never unwelcoming noise you could ever envision. It's an album that expresses these feelings of lost love, of missing out on a past you'll never get the chance to revisit, all via the screaming sound of an amplifier or a blown out mic'ing of a drum kit. It's the feeling of burying your every thought beneath a wave of distortion.
When I was first made aware of this record, I wasn't exactly what I'd describe as a fan of Parannoul. I had certain favourites (including some tracks off After the Magic, and Beautiful World from his sophomore record), but I really wasn't that much of a fan. Still, I had the album thrown my way by a friend, and was curious about the 46-minute rendition of Into the Endless Night that was contained as the album's closer. I thought to myself "yeah, I love shoegaze, why not", and stuck it on. I was expecting something that I'd enjoy, but not necessarily to have all that much connection to the record as a result of my lack of in-depth familiarity with Parannoul's discography.
Almost ninety minutes later, I remember taking my headphones off and just sort of staring at the wall. As the faint ringing in my ears began to subside, I started to grasp what exactly I'd just heard. I immediately pressed play again, and since that day I don't think I've ever really stopped.
I'm a pretty steadfast Parannoul defender nowadays, and have gone back to hear most of his discography. I do, frankly, adore his DIY, universally relatable emo-gaze as much as anyone else on RYM (or indeed in the modern music nerd sphere), with the noise-rock adjacent Sky Hundred certainly taking the cake for his best studio work at the time of writing this review, despite popular consensus seeming to now trend towards his second record still being his best. Despite all that, though, I find nothing in Parannoul's catalogue (or indeed, by almost any other artist in existence) that can quite match After the Night. If you strip away every single other aspect of Parannoul's discography, every studio album and EP, and you just leave this singular live recording, I'd still call him the single greatest solo artist of all time. It means just that much to me.
A typical full track-by-track of this record would honestly be a bit of a waste of time, because a lot of people stumbling on this record are probably already Parannoul fans who are intimately familiar with each of these tracks by now (unless you're like I was, in which case you're in for a real treat). Nonetheless, certain moments of this album immediately spring to mind as ones to highlight in this rambling, shamelessly fanboyish and all around rather pathetic love letter to my single favourite record in existence.
I don't think there was a single better way to open this record than with Polaris, and the rendition on here is utterly superb. The 'drop' segment of the track, where a sea of guitar and noisy, reverberated drum crashes build this wall of hypnotic noise following a rather tame slowcore-esque opening, serves as the perfect gateway into the style of music that After the Night has in store for you. That exact moment feels like passing through the gates of some sort of afterlife - whatever particular afterlife that is really depends on your fondness of guitar distortion, but the analogy makes at least some sense regardless.
In fact, the subject of 'afterlife' is actually quite an interesting thing to mention in relation to this record in particular. In a recent interview Parannoul himself alluded to Into the Endless Night being a representation of death, of momentarily experiencing a sense of purgatory and nothingness, before returning to the real world in a triumphant and life-affirming string-laden conclusion. The track itself feels like there's a great amount of room for personal interpretation beyond that simple, overarching theme from Parannoul himself - or, indeed, it feels almost like those feelings of navigating purgatory (and the incompleteness such a journey would bring) are ones that can ring true in many real-world situations without your reading of the track necessarily being too out there, especially considering the sort of emo tracks Parannoul has put out in the past.
With that being said, I think listening to Into the Endless Night for the first time was one of the single most memorable musical experiences I will ever have. Across those 46 minutes you'll hear everything you could imagine on a record like this. Beautiful, dreamy slowcore & indie-rock. Heartfelt shoegaze and noise pop. Emo guitar lines. Avant-garde jazz, with trumpets (courtesy of Fin Fior) sounding as if they were lifeless screams from the great beyond. Noise rock dissonance. And, most notably, a (spoilers!) harsh noise section that feels as if it's the conclusion of the most epic post-rock build there has ever been. It's emotional, has made me cry far more times than I'm really willing to admit on a RYM account called 'johnmusic29', and that solitary 3-minute section (as well as the peaceful, optimistic ambient/spoken word segment and masterful, fulfilling return to the original melody of the track) truly serves as a reminder that no matter how bad things can seem, there is always a route back to better days.
As if this track couldn't get more heart-wrenching and emotionally challenging, it's coming sequenced right after both I Can Feel My Heart Touching You and White Ceiling. For the former, it takes an (in my opinion) otherwise previously slightly unfulfilled closing track from the fan-favourite To See the Next Part of the Dream and gives it a lease of life with some truly soul-crushing guitar bends and vocals in the outro that feel like yearning pushed to their absolute peak. For the latter, it provides a 10-minute onslaught of noisy guitar and immense drumming amidst some of Parannoul's single greatest and most moving vocal performances, with fiery half-time breakdowns and singalong segments slamming themselves headfirst into the back half of the track to destroy any semblance of an illusion that you might be able to avoid being emotionally destroyed by the first half of the album alone. Indeed, it's quite possibly the single most 'perfect' song on the album, a distillation of everything that After the Night represents in 'only' ten minutes. I know that sounds particularly pretentious and ironic, but when you listen to the track you get the impression it could have gone on for another ten and it wouldn't have come across as stretching itself thin in the slightest.
Above all else, the performances on here are just fantastic. I've never personally taken much issue with Parannoul's percussion across his earlier projects, but there's no real way to put into words how much I utterly adore the drumming on this record. That's quite ironic, as I know multiple drummers who've spoken to me to complain about how 'sloppy' 9SuK's playing can be at times throughout the album, but quite frankly not only did I never notice, but I think his style of machine-gun fills satisfies a void that Parannoul's rather subdued drums simply couldn't occupy on those original records. Not to mention how utterly incredible these drums sound - they tear through each song with their blown out presence in the mix, providing that signature noise that each song utterly bathes in and often serving to be the main driving instrument, which is ironic in a shoegaze record where the guitar playing should really be the stand out.
That's not to say the guitars are any slouch, though. Aside from the aforementioned heart-breaking brilliance captured within I Can Feel My Heart Touching You's bends, Imagination and its sea of screaming, triumphant guitar really puts both Yo and BrokenTeeth's passionate performances on full display, a sentiment that can be seen across the whole album. Oh, and I'd certainly be amiss to not mention the truly wonderful bass playing provided by long-time Parannoul collaborator Asian Glow, who absolutely kills it with these incredibly upbeat and tight performances of high-energy basslines across the likes of Analog Sentimentalism (the 'la-la-la-la' section in particular is probably their highlight across the entire album in terms of performance), which serve the oh so important performance of extracting this fantastic, driving noise pop at each and every moment of the record's runtime.
And, of course, Parannoul himself delivers a captivating performance. His vocals provide a sense of emotion and reach notes he simply couldn't on the studio recordings of these songs (with one of my favourite examples of this being the new emo screams delivered in the outro of Beautiful World), and his keyboard performances are utterly pivotal in giving these songs the sonic diversity they really need to come alive, made doubly impressive by how tight it all sounds in the live setting.
It's that last detail that sometimes makes me forget that After the Night is even real. The fact that you could pay money on the night of January 14th, 2023, and somehow get to see this all unfold right before your eyes? I don't think there's ever been a better deal in all of live music, to be honest.
It must have been an utterly life changing experience to have been in the KT&G Sangsangmadang live hall on that night. What I wouldn't give to have experienced it myself.
10/10
Writing a review for Loveless is a bit of an exercise in futility. What really is there to say about this record that hasn't already been said? The layers of sonic bliss that make up the content of this album have been endlessly dissected by every reviewer under the sun, and even the act of starting a review of it by acknowledging how unoriginal you sound is probably cliched enough at this point.
Yet, here I am, on what must be at least the 100th time I've listened to this record in full (and that's a very, very conservative estimate), and I feel like I'm doing the album itself a disservice if I don't mindlessly gush about how it's essentially changed my understanding of what music can be.
Shoegaze was a genre that I had a bit of a rough time getting into. I was first exposed to Loveless whilst unsuspectingly checking out the RYM top all time album chart. It wasn't a record I was familiar with, and having listened to the majority of the top 10 already I figured I'd give it a go in a free study period at school. As soon as the introducing spatter of Only Shallow's drums gave way to that sea of guitar lines, I was immediately disoriented, confused, curious - essentially every possible reaction you could have to an album was going through my head at that singular moment. The more I listened, I felt like I was growing frustrated with the album. This sea of droning noise wasn't quite like anything I'd ever heard, and yet I felt this odd fascination to keep listening.
For a while, I avoided returning to the record. I think I gave it a middling score (if memory serves me correctly, a 6/10, which is a sin for which I'm sure I'll atone in whatever hellish afterlife I end up in) and tried to move on with my life. Despite that, though, the album just kept calling out to me, in a way that I hadn't experienced previously (or indeed, with almost any other records since).
So, I tried alternative routes to get into the genre. To cut a long story short, Ride's Nowhere ended up serving as my proper jumping off point, getting me more familiar and accepting of this usage of beautiful, overwhelming guitar noise being overlayed atop otherwise catchy and memorable indie rock tracks. It was only after I owned that record on vinyl, had sworn myself as a Ride devotee, and checked out various other albums from the genre (including Slowdive's Just for a Day, as for some reason at the time I was adamant that I didn't enjoy Souvlaki) that I knew I was ready to hear Loveless again.
Suddenly, everything clicked into place. It was like seeing the album in a whole new light. This thick sea of noise wasn't something to wade through in search of a discernible pop song - it was a beautiful textural adornment, a layer of screaming bliss atop some of the most gorgeous and catchy hits that never were.
The first one to really click was "Sometimes", which feels like a somewhat contradictory statement considering I just put so much stock into the fantastic pop songwriting on the record, with the thick, hypnotic droning guitar on "Sometimes" proving to be one of the less pop-inspired tracks on the record. Despite that, though, this song is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard in my life. A suffocated, slowly fading acoustic guitar drowns as it fades away beneath a wall of low end fuzz, with Kevin's longing vocals faintly crying out as they glide above it all. The solitary organ in the background serves as the perfect addition to send the song towards truly stratospheric heights, and after its excellent usage in the equally brilliant 'Lost in Translation' any chance of this song escaping my mind was gone. This is my current favourite track on the whole record, but that accolade changes so frequently that trying to give it out to any particular track is a waste of time.
"When You Sleep" is the moment where you really start to realise Loveless is, at its heart, just a fantastic pop record. The mark of a truly fantastic shoegaze song is often one that can be retranslated to acoustic guitar without losing an ounce of their effectiveness, and "When You Sleep" is certainly no exception to this, as hundreds of indie YouTube covers have taught me over the years. It's a distinction shared with another of shoegaze's finest moments, that being "Alison" by Slowdive, despite both songs taking such a radically different approach to the sound of shoegaze. "When You Sleep" is easily the most accessible track on the record, with the sea of noise serving as a somewhat accessible overlay compared to many of the tracks surrounded by it (and trust me, we'll get onto those). It surprises me that, bar a brief stint as a radio-only promo track, this track was never one that Creation attempted to push as a single. Maybe they were just concerned that anyone who listened to it would become so dangerously infatuated with the record that it could cause mass hysteria.
We're going very out of order on this brief track-by-track, but I really ought to touch on the sonic masterpiece that is "To Here Knows When". I don't think there's a single other song on this album (or, indeed, ever) that can replicate the feeling of ascending to the heavens quite like this one can. The droning, snarling guitar line hangs so delicately over the oddly danceable drum beat and the lead synth (?) line, as you're serenaded by Bilinda's vocals into a state of complete and utter bliss. This track, and I mean this with not an ounce of hyperbole, feels like it's a representation of the heat death of the universe. I'm sure that may sound ridiculously pretentious to most, but trust me, if you're as much of a fan of this record as I am, it's not a particularly controversial statement to make.
"Only Shallow" surely has to be one of the single most daring openers to a record ever. The slight drum count in is the only warning and respite you'll get before an onslaught of guitar bends come to wage war on your audio system. The power chords powering the noisy chorus along give the song all the energy it needs, and Bilinda's vocals are at what is arguably their peak, whispering vaguely sexual (?) promises as the tremolo strumming entrances you into a state of complete delirium.
I find the album's closer, "Soon", to be the closest Loveless gets to even vaguely acknowledging the contemporary 90s music scene surrounding it at the time. Backed up by a sampled, instantly catchy baggy style drum loop, the fuzzy guitar that kicks in during the verse is the only real indication that this isn't the next chart hit from the likes of The Stone Roses or Happy Mondays. It ultimately serves as the perfect closer, offering a dance-inspired point of reference for those who wouldn't normally listen to a shoegaze record, all the while continuing to tear their face off with a wave of gorgeously thick guitar layering.
Out of fear of this review being an incomprehensible wall of praise, I'll refrain from overly analysing the other tracks - please don't interpret this as any sort of statement on their quality (indeed, "What You Want" and "Loomer" are two of the most underrated tracks on the entire album, and outside of the off-kilter interlude track that is "Touched" the album doesn't really stray from perfection once throughout its runtime), but rather not wanting to repeat the compliments I've already given.
Loveless reportedly almost bankrupted Creation Records (although the reliability of Alan McGee's statements on the matter has been called into question many a time), and the entire process drove many of its staff mad. Yet, every single second that Kevin Shields and co. spent perfecting this utter masterpiece of an album clearly did not go to waste. It serves as a statue in a genre, and it arguably almost killed shoegaze before it could even develop because of the simple fact that nobody could live up to its brilliance. In another timeline, I'm sure there's years of build up in the realm of droning ambient noise that comes to explain "To Here Knows When", or some subset of danceable shoegaze that one can draw comparisons with in the case of "Soon". But this is not that timeline. Kevin Shields was just such a visionary that he essentially laid all the groundwork himself, and left it up to his successors to take what Loveless had done and reinterpret it. Even if Loveless may only be my second favourite album of all time (at time of writing, the noisy emo perfection on After the Night just about pips it to the post), I cannot deny that it is the single most influential and important album within shoegaze as a genre, and anyone who denies such a sentiment needs to stop lying to themselves.
Loveless is perfect. It's the most beautiful noise you could ever ask for, in every single quantifiable form.
8/10
Over the past few days, I've been going on a short adventure through the back catalogue of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, for reasons that I find a bit difficult to nail down. I've always had a distinct, emotional fondness for the utterly crushing, noisy, fuzzy warmth of his most acclaimed project, Love Is a Stream, and after a potentially worrying number of replays of that record I decided it might be time to delve a bit further down the rabbit hole.
A Year With 13 Moons is a really interesting stop on this adventure. One thing that I've admired through my delving into Cantu-Ledesma's back catalogue is how his projects are often prone to borrowing moods and themes of past records, but will always mix them up and explore said themes in radically different ways, ways that he has not approached before. So, I was very pleased when coming away from this record to find that it provides new takes on the themes and feelings I get from Love Is a Stream (that being an immense sense of warmth, confusion and loss), but in a very different manner.
A Year With 13 Moons is flirting with being classified as a noise record for a fair chunk of its runtime. This isn't something that would immediately appeal to me, as someone who's never really been a big fan of pure noise music. However, my general exception to that rule is that I can really love and get into noise when it's used sparingly, alongside other elements to provide a good sense of diversity. A Year With 13 Moons more than delivers on that premise. Through its' runtime, you're met with crushing drones, blissful ambient soundscapes and psychedelic retrofuture sounding hypnagogic pop, all accentuated with the screaming sound of a galaxy starting to collapse.
Sure, what an individual might get out of this record is very varied from person to person, and really depends on your willingness to find meaning in the abstract, and to focus on pure texture as opposed to anything else. Despite that, though, A Year With 13 Moons provides a surprising amount of grounded, beat driven moments that serve as something of a reference point for those who might not necessarily check out a record like this. Notable examples that spring to mind are "The Twins/Shadows", "Agate Beach" and my absolute favourite, "Along the Isar", a particularly serene track that almost acts as a rest stop within the sonic battlefield. These feel like the ideas that would build up to the truly jaw-dropping Love's Refrain, one of Cantu-Ledesma's most acclaimed tracks, so it feels a bit odd to see this record go so underappreciated in comparison.
I suppose that might be due to the tracks on here being less developed than Love's Refrain, having less room to breathe and often disintegrating before they really have chance to reach the same mind-numbing heights (with notable exceptions, such as the radical opener "The Last Time I Saw Your Face", which really evokes feelings I hadn't felt since Love Is a Stream, and is a track I'm deeply fond of).
Nonetheless, I think that what is lost in these tracks being given less time to develop is made up for in the stunning sonic diversity on display here. This is truly a great project from Cantu-Ledesma, which doesn't seem to have garnered quite the praise I believe it deserves.
9/10
This EP really caught me by surprise. I was already somewhat familiar with The Radio Dept. and their work thanks to hearing Lesser Matters during my initial forays into shoegaze as a genre, and had picked up a few other favourite individual tracks by them through the following years (including, notably, I Don't Need Love, I've Got My Band, which makes an appearance on this particular EP).
Despite my familiarity with TRD, however, they had never particularly clicked with me as a band. Outside of the aforementioned I Don't Need Love..., none of their songs felt like they had much emotional connection with me, as much as I admired their indietronica-aligned blending of noisy, droning shoegaze synths with poppy, sometimes even arguably twee guitar lines.
That all changed upon hearing this EP. This is one of the most consistent shoegaze projects I've had the pleasure of hearing in a long, long time. I know that might not be particularly remarkable, given the runtime clocks in at just a little under 19 minutes, but not a single second of said runtime goes to waste.
Every track here is essentially just a particularly remarkable execution of the same great formula: take a sombre, downbeat yet still distinctly warm and approachable indie pop track, and drench it in a sea of beautiful noise. From the rather lo-fi sounding and blown out drums, to the signature jagged synth work which serves as TRD's staple, it all meshes together into a gorgeously lush soundscape, one that perfectly accompanies the vulnerable adolescent lyricism being woven into each individual song.
Now, sure, TRD certainly aren't the most experimental when it comes to integrating noise within pop songs. I don't think they'd try and pretend for even a moment that they are, in fact. Despite that, I think the way they do pull it off here is a bit more interesting and fulfilling than many of their noisy indie peers. Maybe that's because of the increased sonic diversity that comes with the focus on electronic elements, I'm not quite sure. It evokes the likes of Sweet Trip and their noisier indietronica cuts, and as a huge fan of that material, this is more than appealing to me.
None of that would be relevant if the underlying songs themselves were uninteresting, though. Thankfully, that is not the case. TRD avoid the trappings of many typical indie pop records and produce works that effortlessly balance vulnerability and melancholia, whilst avoiding sounding too twee or childish. I'm aware just how many times I've referred to it throughout this review, but track 3, I Don't Need Love, I've Got My Band, is undoubtedly my favourite example of this. The way the rather simplistic lyricism weaves a story of self-distractions, only for said self-distractions to be utterly shattered amongst a well of noise in the outro portion, is an idea that's so simple yet effective that I'm surprised I can't name 200 other examples of it being done.
To avoid this entire review essentially being a love letter to one particular track, The City Limit ended up being the other standout here for me. It's definitely the noisiest individual track, and also the most slow-burn and atmospheric material on here. It almost seems to have overtones of Slowdive within the songwriting, feeling particularly like an early version of the opener Slomo from their 2017 comeback record.
Despite only singling out two individual tracks, rest assured that every single song on Pulling Our Weight hovers roughly around the same level of excellence. I cannot recommend this EP enough, and it has more than convinced me to give the rest of TRD's discography the attention I probably should have given it in the first place.
10/10
Whenever I get the feeling to put on Slowdive’s Pygmalion, I get this visual of a blank, white, expansive void stretching out in front of me. Maybe I’m just being influenced by the minimalist cover art, which itself reinterprets 1950s graphic notation to further create the sense of deep unfamiliarity.
It’s such a stark contrast to the warmth, the dense and layered nature of Souvlaki. On that album, from the moment the opening chord of “Alison” bursts into your ears, to the sombre death of the record with “Dagger”, there’s never a moment where you’re alone. Even the more minimal tracks like “Here She Comes” and the dub-influenced “Sing” feel like they’re always reassuringly close, dipping their toes into the realms of ambient and minimalism but always coming back out to remind you they’re there. Couple that with gorgeous blasts of warmth, layered guitars and vulnerable, emotional lyricism and vocal performances from Neil and Rachel, and you have an album that always makes you feel at least the slightest bit familiar with your surroundings, as ethereal and dreamy as they may be.
Pygmalion drenches itself in the opposite. The opening chord of “Rutti” acts as your first indication that you’re travelling deep into the unknown. Taking cues from the likes of “Myrrhman” by Talk Talk off their sublime Laughing Stock, an album that effectively solidified one of the key approaches to post-rock as a genre in the UK in the early 90s (as did its predecessor), you’re immediately made to contend with this feeling of isolation, sparseness, and of unpredictability.
That last one seems particularly strange, considering one of the things Pygmalion is remembered for nowadays is its repetitive structure, which oftentimes draws parallels to the likes of Krautrock whilst pulling (albeit, in a massively transformed manner) bits and pieces from the dance and electronic music of the day. Yet, after that opening chord, the uncertainty as you wait for the next one to be struck feels like a lifetime passing by in all of four seconds. It’s as if you’re staring into nothing, a place completely devoid of structure, where the abstract is at the forefront.
Ian McCutcheon’s rhythmic, almost robotic drumming pushes the track forward, but the guitar stays dancing around in this uncommitted, aimless direction. All the while, Neil’s vocals are the one constant many would keep pushing on to hear. They stray from anything concrete, remaining as cryptic as you’d imagine in a situation like this. It’s taking that philosophy that was pioneered with shoegaze as a genre, of ‘vocals being used as an instrument’, and pushing it to a new level. The vocals here are your lifebuoy amongst a sea of confusion and nothingness. Cling to them, or sink into the abyss forever.
It all helps to give the words more meaning, cryptic as they may be. “Into the light of mine, inside I’ll fall” is a line that always permeates through my brain whenever I think of not just “Rutti”, but this album in general. Not because it’s a lyric that resonates with me on a personal level, or it being some well written quip, or anything like that - but how it fits to introduce you to the world of Pygmalion in the most understated but absolutely memorable fashion possible.
I might have made some vague reference to the ‘vocals as an instrument’ phenomenon of shoegaze in the paragraph before the last one, but don’t get it confused - Pygmalion is, for most of its run, the furthest thing from a shoegaze album possible. An intentional decision, taken at the behest of Neil and Rachel as the shoegazing scene in the UK at the time began to collapse around them, with Alan McGee looking for almost any excuse he could come up with to drop Slowdive from Creation Records’ roster in his constant search for ‘the next Oasis’ to add to the label in their place.
The context surrounding the record, even if it seems a little unremarkable compared to the atmospheric beauty found within its content, has always been one of the reasons I have a deep, deep respect for Pygmalion. Faced with all the odds stacked against them, staring down the barrel of Britpop and with what seems like everyone wishing for their demise, instead of pivoting to match their contemporaries (eg. Ride, Lush) and pumping out a record that is looked back on as an inessential release in their discography brought on by label pressure, Slowdive decided to double down on their never-ending search to expand their sound.
Maybe this was deliberate, their one final way of showing resilience against what Creation had become before they were kicked off the label, the album deleted, and the band disintegrated. Regardless of the reasoning behind the decision, it’s part of why they are my favourite band of all time.
After “Rutti” brings itself to a sudden halt after ten minutes of building, we are met with the sole track on the album that seems to pay homage to Slowdive’s past work. On an album almost completely devoid of walls of guitar, of those washes of sound that defined albums like Just For a Day and Souvlaki, “Crazy For You” is like one final celebration of shoegazing. It’s the death of a genre, mapped out as this subtle, slowly building, and spectacularly unchanging track, that jumps right back into its shoegazing roots just around the three minute mark as the sea of guitar many yearn to hear displays itself for one final time.
“Crazy For You” might be the single most repetitive song on the album lyrically. In fact, it’s one of the single most lyrically repetitive songs I’ve ever heard. I mean, it’s just the words ‘crazy for loving you’ repeated constantly until the track dies out. Yet, I wouldn’t take it any other way. Between Neil’s reverberated, layered vocals and that utterly beautiful, dreamy guitar line that hangs over it all, it’s a deeply honest statement that feels like it meshes so brilliantly with the sound of the track itself. It’s the sound of infatuation, played out in all its atmospheric, beautiful, heart-wrenching and never-ending ‘glory’.
Even the little things on this song make it feel like an outlier at this place on the record. The brief remnants of studio chatter that peek through at the start of the track providing a rare glimpse back to the real world. Ian’s drumming feels more human than it does on a lot of the rest of the record, even if it remains rather unchanging as the track goes.
In fact, many have pointed to the original demo version of this song, which has been available via deluxe reissues and leaks for years now, as the superior version. Arguably, the arrangement presented there might have technically been a greater stylistic fit, with the hypnotic and unchanging drum machine looping in the background matching the philosophy of the record. Yet, there’s a sparseness the final version of “Crazy For You” pulls off that the demo version just can’t match for me, in between those gorgeous swells, the sort of sparseness that reminds you of the void you find yourself in on Pygmalion. Even at the death of the song, you’re met with an almost two minute outro where there are no yearning vocals to be found. No drumming to remind you of the humanity on display. Just some slowly dying guitar feedback, that again feels symbolic of the death of shoegaze as a genre, and the gorgeous twinkle of a guitar line to slowly entrance you back into Pygmalion’s ambient soundscapes.
“Miranda” is what I find to be the ‘point of no return’ for Pygmalion. Many people I’ve asked about this song point to it as one that is more oblique, the moment where the avant-garde tinges this album holds become absolutely impossible to ignore (if they’d managed to ignore them on “Rutti”, anyway). From the constantly looping short acoustic guitar sequence, to Rachel’s angelic vocals - a Slowdive mainstay, sure, but I can’t think I can name another instance where they’ve been given such significance on a track before, maybe even since. “Sing” on Souvlaki is an example that springs to mind, but even that was backed up by a gorgeous dub-inspired instrumental that served as the perfect stage for her vocals to intertwine with.
“Miranda” features almost nothing like that, bar the acoustic guitar I mentioned previously and a brief, constantly layered vocal sample. It really highlights how angelic Rachel’s presence is across this record, somehow even more so than Neil’s already ethereal and wavering vocals. It drags you away from the structure, the more conventional and familiar sounds of “Crazy For You”, and pulls you right back into the unknown. It’s disorienting, psychedelic, and I can’t imagine the album without it.
Going even further down that route, “Trellisaze” was the song that I, a diehard fan of this album, could never quite appreciate for a good while. This is the track that pushes the disorientating and abstract sounds you’ll find throughout Pygmalion to their absolute limit. Structure on this song is almost a deliberate lie. The odd bits of percussion to be found here are sampled, provide very little to hold on to, and almost feel like they’re there to deliberately confuse you more than anything else.
Between that, the occasional bursts of cymbal crashing and guitar noise, and the quiet yet very notable feedback usage which serves as a mainstay to just top off the album’s most hypnotic moments, I feel like I can draw comparisons between this and Talk Talk’s “Taphead”, also from Laughing Stock. There’s no accident between these repeated comparisons - Halstead has gone on record to state his love of late era Talk Talk’s post-rock masterpieces, and it feels like there’s moments on Pygmalion that take concepts Talk Talk originally would have pioneered (themselves no doubt inspired by Krautrock records of the 70s) and drench them in a subtle, atmospheric sheen. It’s a formula that, whilst some might criticise for being a tad unoriginal, is one that I always find utterly fascinating. The lineage of the first wave of UK post-rock has always been something that’s up for a great deal of debate, and it’s not something this review is really cut out to deal with, but seeing concepts evolving over time through the genre naturally, despite the scene itself being fairly small and only just starting to gain steam at this point in time, is something I feel anyone can look back on and appreciate.
A short, ambient interlude, “Cello”, marks the transition back to a slightly more structured beauty. Pulling from another short acoustic guitar section, the chorus of heavenly vocals on “J’s Heaven” mark a slight return to the sounds of “Miranda” from a couple of tracks ago, as does the presence of a thick bass guitar that gives the song a rare sense of structure. You’re still in the void at the moment, searching around for something to cling to amongst the hopeless abstract that’s surrounding you.
Yet, despite that, there’s a newfound sense of melancholy, something we haven’t really felt since “Rutti”. Emotion on Pygmalion feels like something of a foreign concept, and it’s only something the album explores directly when it is confident it can pull it off. For instance, “Crazy For You” and its’ clear romantic intent, which might speak to how ridiculously simple and overwhelming those feelings can be, for an album as often sparse and cryptic as Pygmalion to be able to pull it off with no sense of holding back.
That point almost feels as if it rolls perfectly into “Visions of LA”. The final ‘interlude’ track, an acoustic ballad that is little more than what it establishes from the beginning. Rachel’s vocals are not here for pure atmospheric depth, as reverb-laden as they may be. This track feels like it marks a distinct change, in the back portion of the record. We’re moving towards something concrete, now. Although it may be short, it may be one that is often ignored by many, “Visions of LA” is a key point of structure and change within Pygmalion’s utterly cold and often oblique nothingness. It feels like it calls back to those moments of warmth on “Crazy For You”. It’s building to a climax that, deep down, the listener has been waiting for since Rutti’s first chord was played, at this point about 35 minutes ago.
And on the next track, that climax is fulfilled.
I could write words about “Blue Skied an’ Clear” for hours. I can’t even be sure if this is my personal favourite song on Pygmalion, but it’s always the one that I feel has the most place on the album. It’s the most pivotal, the most critical point on this otherwise lonely, abstract collection of songs. That’s because it feels human. It feels alive.
The verses still hold up some of the album’s most isolated, most psychedelic and hypnotic qualities. From Neil’s background vocals that feel impossible to peg down properly, to the tremolo guitar that dives in and out of the song like it’s filling in for a church organ. Everything feels slightly off, still - although it’s more densely packed than what we’ve been hearing since “Crazy For You”, there’s still this sense of wariness. The album is still bathing itself in the abstract. It’s refusing to show its true self, the true emotion that lurks within.
And yet, in that chorus, everything breaks.
It feels like you’ve emerged into a green, grassy field on a summer’s day. Neil’s vocals turn to these gorgeous, emotion filled chants (“you say love, and it sounds so good…”), as an almost angelic section of guitar lines float around your ears. In most cases, it is the percussion on a track that can totally reinterpret how the other elements sound - in this case, I feel like it’s the other elements that you can find aside from the percussion that change how you view everything else. “Blue Skied an’ Clear” is a song that is loving, incomprehensibly heart-warming, a rush of blood to the head.
There’s no wonder that parallels can easily be drawn between this and Talk Talk’s spiritual masterpiece, “I Believe In You”. Yet, whereas on that track the emotion was provided via Mark Hollis’ sobering lyricism and pained vocal cries, “Blue Skied…” elicits the emotion via the contrast it presents with the rest of Pygmalion. It opens up, and finally reveals everything in an utterly climactic moment.
Even if you think it might be ridiculous to call albums things that can be considered ‘alive’, I feel fairly confident in saying that this track feels like Pygmalion’s soul being laid bare. It is a moment of utter vulnerability on a work so abstract, cryptic and cold, that the impact of its gorgeous swells cannot physically be overstated.
That might be part of why the closing track, “All of Us”, is so heart wrenching. It sounds defeated, after the triumph that was heard on “Blue Skied…”. Even after a moment of utter beauty, of imagining an escape from the album’s sparseness and evasive soundscapes, Slowdive’s position as a band was so untenable, so utterly beyond saving at this time in their career that there was no way those feelings could persist into reality.
“All of Us” is a eulogy. A eulogy to a band who, at the time, were detested, generally misunderstood, ignored, and never given the chance they deserved to shine. As the closing track in Slowdive’s discography, this must have been the most heart-wrenching way to possibly close things out. Even despite the later formation of Mojave 3 and Slowdive’s eventual successful reunion, it’s almost impossible to look back on Pygmalion and not, for just a moment, be transported back to a band in their dying days.
Pygmalion serves as an escape from the real world, to a place often devoid of emotion and of anything to latch onto in the slightest. It’s for these reasons that the striking humanity it displays, alongside its radical sparseness and embracing of silence, make it undoubtedly my favourite record in Slowdive’s discography.
Many may consider it imperfect, a poor follow up to the shoegazing bliss demonstrated on their first two records. Things couldn’t be further from the truth.