expect delay
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 […]
I’m sure that the name of She’s Green is meant to elicit questions – who’s green? Okay, maybe just that one question. But another might be, why does everyone talk about Philadelphia and Austin as being the hotbeds of current American shoegaze when this five-piece is from Minneapolis? On their debut EP Wisteria, released last […]
YouTube channel Angura is a pretty terrific English-language entry point to the world of Japanese indie rock, and they just dropped an excellent mini-documentary about arguably the most successful Japanese indie band in the west right now, Mass Of The Fermenting Dregs. After all, how many other Japanese indie acts can boast sold-out large-venue shows […]
Returning to my intermittent series on quality dreampop from around the corner from me (I almost wrote “from the Six” but nope, can’t do it), we’ve got Toronto trio Swiims, who celebrated the one-year anniversary of their debut album Into The Blue Night yesterday. It’s an assured debut that doesn’t lag or get too samey […]
