expect delay
There’s no interesting “how I found this local band” story for Softcult; the sister-duo of Phoenix and Mercedes Arn-Horn are the biggest local name for shoegaze right now, though if you’re being accurate they’re from Kitchener, not Toronto (me too!) and while some of their catalog definitely checks all the genre boxes, they could just […]
Two things are certain if you enter into any discussion online about must-listen Japanese shoegaze bands. One, that someone will list Kobe’s Mass Of The Fermenting Dregs (with numerous seconds), and two, that someone will make a point of saying that they are not shoegaze. Both of these things are, in fact, true. While you […]
Chicago’s Airiel were one of the acts who kept the shoegaze flag waving in the fallow years for the genre, forming in the late ’90s and making their name with the Winks & Kisses series of EPs in the early aughts, leading up to their 2007 debut album The Battle Of Sealand and its follow-up […]
And now, strange ways to discover local bands, part two. It shouldn’t be any surprise I follow a number of Japanese shoegaze concert promoters on socials; I find it a good way to discover new acts from that part of the world. Recently, I’d noticed a series of posts and ads from one of them, […]
I know I just posted a song by Kurayamisaka a week and a half ago, but they literally released this new song the next day… and I didn’t have anything else ready for today, so why not one of the top earworms of the last while?. Any fears the band were getting too gentle over […]
Rabbit holes are funny things. A couple days ago, conscious of the fact that I was spending a lot of time digging up worthy new shoegazey-and-adjacent bands from around the world, I was possibly/probably ignoring new talent closer to home. So leveraging the crack researching skills I developed over a decade plus of music blogging, […]
Lots of things about Los Angeles’ Draag hint that they’d like to be perceived as darker/gothier/heavier than they are – album and song titles sound like they would talk at length about their level 30 half-elf figher-magic user, given the chance, but musically, they’re just too pretty to pull it off. That’s not a slight, […]
One of the buzzier new acts in the Japanese shoegaze/dreampop world has been Tokyo’s Kurayamisaka, who stormed onto the scene with their remarkably confident and evolved 2022 debut mini-alubm kimi wo omotte iru. Picking a standout track from the five and a half options is hard – opener “theme” is just a one-minute build-up, but […]
I won’t pretend it gets a lot of traction in the way of page views, but I really do enjoy discovering new acts from around the world who never, ever would have gotten on my radar if I was still on the hamster wheel of music PR like I was in a previous life. Instead, […]
I’m still a bit high from Tuesday night’s superb Ride show here in Toronto – pics here – my first time seeing them in seven years, having missed their last two visits due to a conflict with a Massive Attack show and my son’s birthday. Sufficed to say, I didn’t want to miss this one. […]
