expect delay
At first, you might think the even the name is a joke. Tokyo Shoegazer? And… they’re shoegazers? From Tokyo? Well, yes. And it’s fitting that Tokyo Shoegazer is a sort of avatar for everything about Japanese shoegaze; it’s not original or boundary-pushing, but it’s also not trying to be. Instead it’s taking everything they love […]
I didn’t realize it’d been so long since we’d heard from Sweden’s Echo Ladies – pandemics do things to one’s perception of time – but it has been five years since their 2018 debut Pink Noise and saying it out loud, well that’s far too long. So it’s great to hear them back with a […]
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 […]
With six years having passed since Slowdive’s last album – a long time, certainly, but not as long as the 22 years that preceded it – there hasn’t been a lot of press around the band of late. Sure, they’ve started touring again in the past year, but really the only question anyone’s asking is, […]
On one hand, Catherine Wheel fans have only themselves to blame for thinking the band were finally reuniting – frontman Rob Dickinson has given no signs he’s interested in giving up the world of custom luxury automobiles for the life of a touring rock band – but whoever they’ve got managing their social media accounts […]
Just in case you think my explorations of Asian shoegazers is limited to acts coming out of Japan, I direct you to Manic Sheep, who hail from Taipei, Taiwan. “No More Anger” was a single taken from their second album, 2016’s Brooklyn, and if the Ameri-centric album title wasn’t a tip off, there’s very little […]
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 […]
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 […]
