expect delay
It may or may not be clear to readers that I’ve descended down a vast and deep rabbit hole of Japanese shoegaze and dreampop which will almost certainly inform content hereabouts for a long time to come. And the white rabbit that led me here is For Tracy Hyde, whose fifth album Hotel Insomnia was […]
A new band with an impeccable pedigree, MEMORIALS is the duo of Matthew Sims – he of It Hugs Back and Wire – and Verity Sussman of Electrelane. Though the two had collaborated off the record for some time, their first officially released output comes in the form of soundtracks for a pair of documentary […]
Sometimes simply Googling the name of an artist and “complete show” can be surprisingly fruitful. There’s not a ton of high quality live I Break Horses footage out there, since Maria Lindén and company aren’t exactly road warriors, but this recording of their performance at the Refinery Gallery in Bratisalva, Slovakia in April 2014 as […]
It’s been four years since Amber Bain – aka The Japanese House – released her sumptuous debut Good At Falling, and she’s been pretty much radio silent since her Chewing Cotton Wool EP came out in late 2020. Official word on the follow-up is still forthcoming, but she’s finally returned with new music in the […]
I’m not sure how a cable network like Showtime makes a business case for financing feature-length documentaries on cult bands like XTC, but I’m certainly glad that they do because ones like 2017’s XTC: This Is Pop are really terrific. In the opening minute, guitarist and frontman Andy Partridge takes the piss out of the […]
Quite a rollercoaster week last week for North American Cure fans. First, there was the excitement around the announcement of their tour this Summer for their forthcoming Songs Of A Lost World. That gave way to confusion when the ticketing was announced to be following the TicketMaster “Verified Fans” model, and turned into anger when […]
New York’s Asobi Seksu certainly had their unique angle in the mid-aughts shoegaze revival with their blend of dreampop and J-pop, complete with bilingual vocals from frontwoman Yuki Chikudate, but as the decade rolled over, their attempts to move away from the elevator pitch that made their early work so appealing yielded diminishing returns and […]
Fazerdaze technically returned from the wild last Summer, with a handful of singles leading to the digital release of her Break! EP last October. But those who got their hands on the physical 12″ – released last Fall in Australia and the rest of the world just last week – found a little surprise in […]
It was a truly perverse bit of timing that almost the same moment that Tokyo shoegaze/dreampop veterans For Tracy Hyde got a glowing review in Pitchfork for Hotel Insomnia, their fifth album in ten years, they announced they were splitting up, declaring: Since the turn of last year, we had been thoroughly discussing about our […]
Montreal’s Bodywash are another in the seemingly bottomless reservoir of worthy dreampop bands coming out the city. The duo of Chris Steward and Rosie Long Decter offer up lovely, laid back dreampop that blends balearic beats with Loveless-friendly six string textures. Is chillgaze a thing? Their debut Comforter came out in 2019, with “With Heat” and […]
