expect delay
Keeping up with Japanese bands when you don’t have any real kind of understanding of the language is… imprecise at best. You have a fighting chance with the acts who exist at least at a cursory level in English, but those who transact mainly in Japanese kanji will always remain, at some level, a mystery […]
Austin’s Ringo Deathstarr are one of those bands that I’ve always meant to spend more time with than I have, despite having had ample opportunity – they’ve been at it for nearly 20 years – and having already even seen them live, but I just haven’t done more than a few drive-by passes through their […]
“Steve Queralt featuring Emma Anderson” is a little more of a mouthful than, say, “Ride featuring Lush“, but when the first preview of the Ride bassist’s debut solo album comes with vocals from Lush’s co-frontwoman – truly a confluence of OG shoegazers – you pay attention. And when that preview slaps – in the millennial […]
When we last checked in with Venice, Italy’s Glazyhaze, they’d just announced details of their second full-length album SONIC and shared the second of three preview tracks from the album. Well the album arrived this past Friday and with it came another video for latest single “Slap”. Which, in the parlance of our time, this […]
I’ve mentioned before that my descent into the deep, bottomless rabbit hole of Japanese shoegaze began in early 2022 with For Tracy Hyde’s final record Hotel Insomnia, but navigating the scene over there – which goes back 15 to 30 years, depending on which thread you pull on – is no easy task, particularly when […]
You’d be forgiven for thinking that everything was and would remain quiet in Chapterhouse-land, what with the OG shoegazers having done the reunion thing way back in 2010 and having cleared out the archives with their expansive six CD Chronology box set in 2023. You might have missed out on that set what with it […]
Every once in a while I’ll wonder what The Radio Dept. are up to, and the answer is usually posting anti-fascism messages on their Instagram – their only active internet presence – and not crafting more beautifully melancholic lo-fi dreampop… and, honestly, it’s hard to fault them for that, all things considered. But that doesn’t […]
I got into the tangled mess that is Sad Lovers & Giants‘ discography – a shimmering and underappreciated intersection of post-punk and dreampop – a few years ago and it’s somehow gotten even knottier since. I tried to untie some of it but have no idea what is true and speculation regarding the provenance of […]
Like many, I suspect, I found my way to Tokyo’s AprilBlue via the fallout from the disbanding of For Tracy Hyde in early 2022. One of the main questions from distraught fans of the Japanese shoegaze heroes was “what can we listen to now?”, and the easy answer was the (many) other projects from chief […]
There’s a disconnect between the post title and hero image because, well, these old Guitar Player (RIP) covers have nothing to do with the editorial team at gear marketplace Reverb.com. But seeing the latter’s recent feature on The Cure, I was reminded that for a player with the longevity, influence, and distinctiveness that Robert Smith […]
