Top 10 Shoegaze Revivalists (Who Do More Than Just Revive)

If you’re like me, and got up early one morning to buy My Bloody Valentine reunion tour tickets the second they became available online, and periodically opened a special Ziploc bag to hold and stare at said tickets (not quite convinced that they’re real), then by all means, please read on. 

You needn’t spend your life sifting through 4AD’s back catalogue or wait around for dissolved bands to magically reassemble to enjoy the effects-laden dream-pop of the 80’s and early 90’s—plenty of acts have borrowed on that beautiful noise, and the best have updated it with true panache. Here are a few of this century’s most promising shoegazers. 

1)  Apparat (99 Problems & The Glitch Ain’t One)— Berliner Sascha Ring started out in the club and launched himself into the heavens.  Perhaps it’s just the coloring of hindsight that finds luxurious spaces amid the bit-crunches of his early techno, but the hyper-evolved polish of 2007’s pop breakthrough Walls argues that just ain’t so.  Icy electronic beats and a slick throb remain the order of the day on the dancehall-ready disc, but they’re increasingly smeared into pastel curls of ethereal sound, shot through with the glittering shrapnel of a much dirtier DJ.

2)  Asobi Seksu (Sensual Sounds) — My Bloody Valentine grounded itself in the erotic, combining song titles like “Feed Me With Your Kiss” and “Cupid Come” with a foxy swagger/swoon.  New York’s Asobi Seksu are as libidinous, but not quite so serious about it—their name is slangy Japanese for “playful sex.”  Further Japanese lyrics from frontwoman Yuki Chikudate and bright walls of reverb warp keep 2007 sleeper hit Citrus tart and fresh throughout.  The palette includes warm organ and occasional strings, but there’s limited room for a bouncy indie vibe next to the addictive, candy-coated thunder and lightning of James Hanna’s guitar.       

3)  The Field (Blissed-Out Concrete)— Painting had pointillism, writing has flash fiction, and the musical canon just gained a comparable one-man movement in The Field, aka Alex Willner, whose vision is deceptively simple: He reassembles the interstitial fragments of once-recognizable songs with a Lower East Side minimalist’s interests at heart.  The uncanny repetitions of micro-phrases work each track of 2007’s masterful From Here We Go Sublime into a full lather before abruptly inverting themselves as the seamless Möbius strip rolls on (and on and on).  A house-ish thump and grind propel the long-player nicely, and Willner finds plenty of reasons for you to move your body even with his head in the academic clouds.

4)  Jesu (Shine On, Black Metal)— Judging by the leaden crawl of Jesu’s (recovering industrial-metal paragon/producer Justin Broadrick’s) mystic guitar, you’d never guess he’s the most prolific artist in this notoriously slow-to-record genre rife with fickle perfectionists.  Coming off his career-making stint with Godflesh, Broadrick continues to go big in plenty of ways—marathon song lengths, heavily textured electronics, crushing riffs—but it’s the subversively downtempo and ambient impulses that make his world of stately drones so rich and inviting.  Outright curveballs are in no short supply either—”Storm Comin’ On,” a collaboration with mistress of vocal doom Jarobe off the Lifeline EP, is steeped in Gothic twang as beautiful as it is weird.

5) Kiss Me Deadly (Interstellar Noir)— Deep space is a good place for nihilism, so it’s surprising how few post-rock bands have tried to take us there.  The chilling grays of Godspeed You Black Emperor and the sand-blasted wastelands of Explosions In The Sky are patently terrestrial, making distant cousin Kiss Me Deadly that much more revelatory.  2005’s inexcusably dismissed Misty Medley boasts boiling guitars that boomerang and ricochet according to the jittery calculus of dance, the squeals and frissions of vox extraordinaire Emily Elizabeth doing a Life Without Buildings impression on the mic, and stretches of eerie instrumental melancholy only to be found beyond low-Earth orbit.  Add a pinch of visceral Modest Mouse stomp and you’ve got an LP for all occasions.

6)  M83 (Retro-future Epics)— Somebody has surely already written that M83’s M.O. is half Blade Runner and half John Hughes, but who cares, it’s as accurate as any quick intro is gonna get.  And it’s no accident that critics reach for cinematic reference points with Anthony Gonzalez, the last man standing of a former duo that named itself after a distant spiral galaxy: his songs are huge, densely layered, and set the emotional stakes to “kill.”  Unlike irreverent peers, Gonzalez weaves 80s soundscapes devoid of irony, deploying the cheesiest textures possible while remaining unswervingly faithful to their power.  The deadpan melodrama of the lyrics is just icing on the cake.

7)  A Sunny Day In Glasgow (Mad Scientist Twee)— Just when the voices of (identical twins) Lauren and Robin Daniels threaten to fade away in decaying wisps, brother Ben throws in a furry electro gearshift, leaving you surprised and grinning.  Numinous, chiming dissonance can just as easily give way to sweetly innocent melody, because atmosphere is a thrillingly elastic property in these siblings hands, not something to be made and forgotten about like a stock purchase.  The always twisting Cubist angles of the Philadelphian crew’s outstanding Scribble Mural Comic Journal make for irrepressible fun, a smattering of UV rays filtered through wet gray mist, as the apt band name contends.         

8.)  A Place To Bury Strangers (The Loudest Band In New York)—  Perusing APTBS frontman Oliver Ackermann’s line of custom effects pedals, you’d be forgiven for thinking product names like “Total Sonic Annihilation” are less literal than cheeky—but you’d be terribly mistaken. The savage Brooklyn three-piece have destroyed audiences and provoked the wrath of law enforcement time and again by whipping up feedback-drenched tempests in teacup-sized venues.  Ministry-inspired industrial beats go up against apocalyptic howls of distortion as Ackermann gives his whammy bar—sorry—a handjob, somehow coaxing a sick, damaged, and shockingly gorgeous pop out through the echoing storm.         

9)  Videohippos (Day-Glo Visions)— Shoegaze imitators trip up when they emphasize shimmering prettiness over the simmering chaos that bubbles through the movement’s best compositions.  The true challenge, I’d argue, is not in wah-wahing your way to dreamland but sculpting boundless noise into an earthly garden of delights.  Videohippos, as their Saturday-morning-cartoon moniker suggests, do so by extracting the transient din of TV and Web 2.0 culture and kneading it into something as tragic and hyperactive as a latchkey kid who’s been forced to eat a box of Fruit Loops for dinner.  Live shows add some hallucinatory stagecraft that’s equal parts Home Shopping Network and Plan 9 From Outer Space, burying bittersweet earworm melodies even further in splatter-zones of doublespeak and disintegrating neon pop.  

10.) Ulrich Schnauss (Sinuous Synth)— Easily the most maligned artist on this list, Schnauss can come off as a lot of New Age hooey if you’re not listening closely, but the European gloss emanating from this nügazer’s synth stable is studded with mesmerizing nuance.  Combining muted breakbeatery with watercolor vocals and plush keyboards makes for excellent travel music—the rushing-by landscape of a scenic train ride is a nearly inescapable parallel.  But Schauss’ love of journey over destination is perhaps his greatest asset: songs like “Look At The Sky,” for all their hurtling forward, never reach a logical endpoint; they build from modest bleeps and whirrs into brief triumphant cloudbursts, then drift off over the horizon.     

 

Honorable Mentions:

 

Deerhunter (Anglo-fried Southern)— Alabama’s Deerhunter are a tech-geeky bunch.  Not that their sound has a phony studio sheen, mind you—all their sonic manipulation is done on the spot, as the skronky fuzz of Cryptograms bears out.  That album rode loops of hypnotic, hard-nosed psych, stretching multipart prog suites to the breaking point, with tensions allowed to fester over six or seven taut minutes.  This fall’s Microcastle explodes the trippier flow of its predecessor, declaring all-out war on anything that might be called “filler” and lacing into straighter rock while retaining the spidery art-house pallor of Wire in their darkest experiments.

 

Times New Viking (Straight-up S***gaze)  — In person, Times New Viking must seem to play adorable-if-messy boy/girl guitar pop.  On your stereo, they’re vicious noiseniks, deep in thrall to static squall.  That these Ohioans see nothing mutually exclusive in such descriptions is clearly to their advantage—they throw down barbed 90s-indie hooks like the best of their Midwestern forebears and corrode steel-trap phrasing with hydrochloric acid.  The resulting haze of analog crackle is a DIY effect countless bands strive for, and it may be just as self-conscious a choice here, but Times New Viking’s punklike commitment to their bit makes all the difference.

 

Belong (Big Beatless)— Drums are a tricky proposition for shoegazers.  Too often they’re just dialed down in the mix till the tempo’s clear as mud.  Give some credit to New Orleans duo Belong, then, for a bold solution few besides Lovesliescrushing have considered: get rid of them.  The result is an Abstract-with-a-capital-A collage of electric tones that seep out of guitars like blooming stains.  If  2006’s October Language is something of an audible Rorschach test, 2008’s covers-only EP, Colorloss is a spectral vision of psychedelic subconscious, a shape-shifting set of white noise arcs curving towards sounds yet unmade.