expect delay
Arizona’s Alison’s Halo are one of the OG American shoegazers, having formed way back in 1992 and despite going to ground before the turn of the century, remained one of the first names you’d think of when talking about the first wave of the genre from the Americas. They reformed in 2009 for sporadic shows […]
One of the OGs of the current Japanese shoegaze scene, the oddly-named-even-for-Japan Seventeen Years Old And Berlin Wall have been releasing mini-albums of boy-girl sharp-sweet fuzzy-shimmering dreampop since 2015. Whether they number four or five depends on your criteria for distinguishing an EP from a mini-album, and whether mini-album is even a thing – the […]
It remains a tragedy that the Lush reunion ended the way it did, when it started out so promisingly. Unlike their peers, they started out in the studio rather than the stage and had a new EP in Blind Spot ready to go, coming out just days after their first reunion gig in April 2016. […]
When I wrote up South Korean dreampop trio Swiimers back in January, they’d been radio silent for over a year since their last singles “Knight Verse” and “Winter Resolution” dropped at the end of 2022, and I assumed they – like many indie bands from Asia – had simply quietly ceased operations to move on […]
Los Angeles dreampop trio Soft Blue Shimmer will return with their third album They Will Leave Us With Nothing next year on February 28. The band haven’t offered much about the new record yet, but the album announcement came with the brief comment: In a year of grief, struggling, and often sudden & uncomfortable change, […]
Robin Guthrie has had a pretty busy year by his standards, with the Cocteau Twins’ The Moon & The Melodies reissue in the Summer and his own Astoria and Atlas EPs of new music and a smattering of standalone archival tracks released on his Bandcamp. Additionally, today he has re-released on CD a couple of […]
Gig-going wasn’t the primary purpose of going to Japan earlier this year – it ranked somewhat below taking my son to see a giant Buddha statue an hour outside of Tokyo – but I was still thrilled to be able to manage both a huge arena show – Hitsujibungaku in Yokohama – and a little […]
Christmas came early today for fans of Japanese indie, with new tracks dropping from Moon In June, Beachside Talks, and Yuragi, to name a few, but I’ll put the spotlight on Hammer Head Shark. They not only released a new single in “a . to . the . la . ru” (「アトゥダラル僻地」in Japanese, yes the […]
Slowdive announced the next North American leg of their everything is alive tour this week, which I’d been waiting for since since they were announced as being part of Boston’s Something In The Way festival back in September. The fact that this will be their fourth set of dates in Canada and the US in […]
The current explosion of Japanese shoegaze bands can usually be traced back to the early 2010s and the Kinoko Teikoku supernova, but if you go further back in time you’ll find the real big bang began in the late ’90s – not quite early enough to be contemporaries of the UK forebears, but certainly immediate […]
