expect delay
I’ve been trying to learn to play a few selections from Swervedriver’s back catalog lately and have really come to appreciate how unconventional Adam Franklin’s playing and writing style is. His musical brain is an interesting place to be, and I’ve been living in it and the Swervedriver oeuvre a fair bit of late. So […]
As architects of what would become known and loved as “shoegaze”, the specifics of Ride’s musical tools have always been of particular interest to a certain segment of society. So it’s kind of a tragedy that none of the guitar-centric articles from their first go-around seem to exist online… and by “none of”, I mean […]
Sometimes I’ll write a lot about a song I post, sometimes I won’t. Guess which time this is? It’s Swervedriver, and “Duel” the lead single from sophomore record Mezcal Head. Speaks for itself. But I will mention that I’ve found another guitar tutorial site with excellent taste in lessons. Swervedriver guitar parts are not easy […]
I don’t really buy into including Velocity Girl in the ’90s American shoegaze scene like, say, Lilys or Drop Nineteens. Partly because I like VG much more than those other acts , and also because they pivoted out of their ‘gazey phase pretty quickly in favour of delicious power-pop on their last two records – […]
A lot going on right now that precludes putting any longer-type posts together for the moment, so I’ll just drop this bit of aural bliss, the title track from Cocteau Twins‘ 1990 masterwork, Heaven Or Las Vegas. Not a bad place to go if you need to chill out and get lost in Elizabeth Fraser’s […]
Yesterday marked the 30th birthday of Slowdive’s debut full-length, Just For A Day, and in looking for something to post in commemoration of the event – I already posted one of the only videos from the record a few months ago – and in doing so I found this interesting artifact dating back to the […]
After Slowdive disbanded in 1994, principals Neil Halstead, Rachel Goswell, and drummer Ian McCutcheon regrouped almost immediately as Mojave 3, releasing their debut Ask Me Tomorrow in 1995. Quiet, elegant, and sparse, it seemed a flipside to Slowdive’s then-final record Pygmalion, sharing its appreciation for space, though trading its electronic DNA for acoustic. As it […]
Pale Saints are a band I started out with backwards from conventional wisdom, finding a copy of their third and final album – 1994’s Slow Buildings – in a pawn shop CD bin in the mid-’90s. It’s not the one most would recommend since by this point, Ian Masters – the band’s founder and vocalist […]
Describing a band as sounding like they were put together in a lab seems like it’s some kind of put-down, but in the case of Malmö’s Echo Ladies, it’s the highest praise. Think of The Radio Dept if they leaned into the fuzziest aspects of Lesser Matters. Their debut self-titled EP and full-length follow-up Pink […]
Conventional wisdom holds that Slowdive’s second album Souvlaki is their masterpiece – certainly it’s my go-to of their catalog – but the critical re-evaluation Pygmalion – their once-but-no-longer swan song – has gotten over the past quarter-century is pretty remarkable. On its initial release in February of 1995, it seemed to be cursed. Drummer Simon […]
