expect delay
The Apple Music recommendation algorithm really wants me to listen to Luby Sparks. Almost without fail, whenever one of the Japanese dreampop/shoegaze albums that have been in heavy rotation for me lately wraps, it segues into a track from the Tokyo outfit’s 2018 self-titled debut. And it’s a bit of a curious choice since of […]
It’s a good day when you’re reminded that The Clientele remain an active concern. Their last musical dispatch came in 2020 with “Orpheus Beach”, a one-off Go-Beetweens cover, so it’s a good start to the week when you receive news that they’re returning with a new album – their first since 2017’s Music For The […]
As someone who has seen and photographed Beach House live a number of times, I find it somewhat comforting that even an outlet with the clout and resources of Pitchfork can’t get more than shadowy blurs for a lot of their footage. They recorded the entirety of the band’s show in Brooklyn on August 23, […]
Toronto’s Mother Tongues were an early discovery of this blog and the first concert I went to in over two years, in Fall 2021 during a small break in pandemic closures. They made their recorded debut in Summer of 2020 with the trippy psychedelic multi-hyphenate pop of the Everything You Wanted EP, and now return […]
Here’s another instalment in the series I’ll call “Cocteau for Cocteau’s sake”, where I’ll just throw some Cocteau Twins material out there because doing so makes the world a marginally better place. Wikipedia says that the band had two videos before this one, taken from 1984’s The Spangle Maker EP, but I can’t find it […]
So I’ve just returned from my first trip to New York in over four years, the longest absence in almost 20 years. And with a three-year old at home, you know it’d have to be a pretty good reason to get away, even if just for a weekend, and it was – Melody’s Echo Chamber […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
