Earlier this work, I took to my main IG account to post a 20+ year old pic of Steve Schlitz, frontman for New York’s Longwave, after seeing him on Saturday Night Live filling in for Nick Valensi in The Strokes.
As I mentioned in the post, I was a big fan of the band circa their 2002 debut Endsongs and their 2003 major label debut The Strangest Things as they were one of the few bands out there keeping the shoegaze/dreampop torch burning at what was arguably the genre’s popular nadir. I expected pretty much nothing in the way of engagement, but the post got shared by the band and then by some Strokes-adjacent accounts and it’s been one of my more popular posts in a long time, with a number of fans from two decades ago declaring their love for the band. The internet can still surprise you sometimes!
For my part, I’ve been revisiting those records and have been reminded just how good they were, and will be following through to their later records – I don’t think I listened to anything post 2005’s There’s A Fire, though I was aware that they returned from an extended hiatus a few years ago with a new record, If We Ever Live Forever, in 2019.
It’s interesting how they qualified as shoegazers two decades ago when you compare them to what gets put into that particular cubby hole these days. While they clearly loved their pedals and interesting guitar sounds – guitarist Shannon Ferguson currently builds pedals as Swell Noise – there was a devotion to songcraft and hooks that, respectfully, is not always a priority with the new school. Their guitar lines danced and wove (and also echoed and shimmered) but were not buried under reverb and fuzz. “Grunge-gaze” was not a thing. And without those mandatory genre hallmarks, the band were free to evolve without worrying about any backlash from subreddit gatekeepers, which they already started doing with There’s A Fire. They may not have been in step with the NYC garage rock revival and missed the proper shoegaze revival by a few years, but their oeuvre is really worth remembering and revisiting. Which is what I’m doing now.
It’s a damn shame that Endsongs doesn’t exist on streaming anywhere, almost as much of a shame that I don’t appear to own it on CD anymore. I think I bought it online from the band directly like almost 25 years ago. It may have come in a slimline jewel case. Maybe it fell behind a bookshelf somewhere. I think I liked it more than Strangest Things at the time, but that could have just been me being snobby. So I’ll offer up one of the singles and highlights from The Strangest Things, which came with a video apparently filmed at the Scandia amusement park in Ontario, California.
They released a second video in 2024 compiled from footage shot on their 2002 and 2003 tour, so that graininess and blur is honestly come by. No filter! I can’t tell if any of that footage came from either Toronto show I attended, but the t-shirt in my pic makes a few appearances.
The band released a live album in 2020 documenting the final date of their tour for If We Live Forever at New York’s Bowery Ballroom. The show was also professionally filmed and while I’ve bookmarked “Tidal Wave”, obvs, you can see the whole thing.
The Bowery Ballroom also hosted a one-off in January 2024 which is their last show to date, but hopefully not their final one. 600 likes on one dude’s IG photo in a Canadian corner of the internet is nothing to shake a stick at.
And oh damn, I just found my Strangest Things t-shirt. It kinda smells from being in a box for 20 years, but still fits. Win.
