expect delay
Arizona’s Alison’s Halo are one of the OG American shoegazers, having formed way back in 1992 and despite going to ground before the turn of the century, remained one of the first names you’d think of when talking about the first wave of the genre from the Americas. They reformed in 2009 for sporadic shows […]
One of the OGs of the current Japanese shoegaze scene, the oddly-named-even-for-Japan Seventeen Years Old And Berlin Wall have been releasing mini-albums of boy-girl sharp-sweet fuzzy-shimmering dreampop since 2015. Whether they number four or five depends on your criteria for distinguishing an EP from a mini-album, and whether mini-album is even a thing – the […]
It remains a tragedy that the Lush reunion ended the way it did, when it started out so promisingly. Unlike their peers, they started out in the studio rather than the stage and had a new EP in Blind Spot ready to go, coming out just days after their first reunion gig in April 2016. […]
When I wrote up South Korean dreampop trio Swiimers back in January, they’d been radio silent for over a year since their last singles “Knight Verse” and “Winter Resolution” dropped at the end of 2022, and I assumed they – like many indie bands from Asia – had simply quietly ceased operations to move on […]
It probably doesn’t need to be said out loud, but the ’80s were a weird time. In the ’70s, Wire were the genre-busting art school firebrands redefining punk, and on their second resurrection in the early 21st century, they were the angry elder statesmen of art rock. But their second incarnation, where they absorbed the […]
Los Angeles dreampop trio Soft Blue Shimmer will return with their third album They Will Leave Us With Nothing next year on February 28. The band haven’t offered much about the new record yet, but the album announcement came with the brief comment: In a year of grief, struggling, and often sudden & uncomfortable change, […]
Robin Guthrie has had a pretty busy year by his standards, with the Cocteau Twins’ The Moon & The Melodies reissue in the Summer and his own Astoria and Atlas EPs of new music and a smattering of standalone archival tracks released on his Bandcamp. Additionally, today he has re-released on CD a couple of […]
As mentioned, part of the promotion around the release of New Order’s Brotherhood: The Definitive Edition was the second season of the excellent Transmissions podcast that tracks the history of the band through the “World In Motion” single. One of the choice tidbits was the origins of the “Touched By The Hand Of God” single, […]
Gig-going wasn’t the primary purpose of going to Japan earlier this year – it ranked somewhat below taking my son to see a giant Buddha statue an hour outside of Tokyo – but I was still thrilled to be able to manage both a huge arena show – Hitsujibungaku in Yokohama – and a little […]
Pretty quiet day on the internet if you’re not a retail outlet, so I’ll wrap up the week/month with this complete live Chameleons show, professionally recorded in multi-camera style by French filmmaker Sébastien Faits-Divers, from almost exactly a year ago in Porto, Portugal. This was not one of the Strange Times shows that kept the […]
