Kinoko Teikoku / The First Demo Album

Unofficial archival releases from beloved, departed bands is nothing new so at first I expected that this collection of early demos from Japanese shoegaze godheads Kinoko Teikoku was going to be some kind of sketchy, poor quality MySpace rip or something. Well colour me surprised to learn that The First Mini Demo Album is not […]

KILDREN – “Fluid”

I was pretty keen on Tokyo’s KILDREN last year based on a handful – or fingerful, really – of songs released last April that carried the torch of For Tracy Hyde-influenced J-gaze-pop high and proud. Well perhaps the band weren’t quite so proud after all. They returned almost a year later this past April with […]

Savages – “Flying To Berlin”

Spurred by recent solo activity by Savages drummer Fay Milton’s Goddess project and news of frontwoman Jehnny Beth’s upcoming solo record You Heartbreaker You (coming August 29), I’ve gone wandering through their back catalog and even though I was still well in the music media game when they came on the scene, I did not […]

Clinic Stars – “Only Hinting”

It figures that a band that create as delicate, fragile, and internal-sounding dreampop as Detroit’s Clinic Stars don’t have a tremendous online presence – a Bandcamp, an Instagram, and a couple of shaky fan-shot live videos – but when they’ve already given us a record as beautiful as their 2024 full-length debut Only Hinting, asking […]

Blankenberge – “Escape”

Russian shoegaze masters Blankenberge have been teasing their fourth album since last September, but while the samples of the new record have been expectedly euphoric, they’ve been very light on details about the new album itself. Last weekend, they released their third preview of the new record along with very subtle visualizer, but again resisted […]