I found this S.C.U.M. video in a list of Shoegaze videos, and I see them described as “Post-punk,” but what they sound like to me is 1980s-era Simple Minds. Here’s “Whitechapel.”
By the way, Simple Minds are still around and have a tour coming next year, but S.C.U.M. broke up in 2013.
Collapse is another obscure Japanese Shoegaze band. Or maybe not so obscure, since they already have ten albums and EPs out. Their earlier songs seem more My Bloody Valentine-influenced, but their later stuff seems a bit more Dreampop with a noisebed base, maybe Tokyo Shoegazer by way of The Cherry Wave and Civic with a soupcon of Asobi Seksu thrown in. Here’s “Path.”
Here’s “The Slab,” the final track from Slowdive’s new Everything is Alive album. But I should warn you that this is a case where the song of the CD is much stronger than the compressed version on YouTube:
I finally got the CD in this week, and I think it’s a very strong album, more consistent than their previous self-titled album, but only time will tell is something as strong as “Slomo” or “No Longer Making Time” emerges as particular favorites. (And the later only really twigged for me when it became such a burner live.)
Forty years ago today, August 19, 1983, Genesis released their self-titled album (their twelfth), and “Mama” was the first single released off that.
As a fairly new convert to classic Prog Rock Genesis at the time, I wasn’t a fan of Genesis’ move toward more mainstream pop, but “Mama” caught my attention, as it’s a pretty interesting song. And far from being an average pop song, it was weird and sinister.
And it has perhaps the most memorable laugh in any song, ever.
Peter Gabriel-era Genesis had a lot more overtly sinister songs (“The Waiting Room” comes to mind), but “Mama” was distinctly different from Genesis’ 1980s output, or indeed, just about anything else on mainstream radio in 1983. Between the sparse drum loop, the eerie high synthesizer wash, and Collins’ urgent, hungry vocals about a young man’s unrequited love for a prostitute, it still has power four decades on.
Everything is Alive, Slowdive’s long-rumored next album, is finally coming out September 1, and “Kisses,” the first single from it, just dropped.
I still love the way Neil Halstead constructs songs.
Been a while since we did some Japanese Shoegaze, so here’s Kinoko Teikoku’s “Musician”:
It sounds a bit like Asobi Seksu crossed with Lemon’s Chair. It takes about 30 seconds to get beyond the initial noisy buzz.
Kinoko Teikoku evidently means “Mushroom Empire,” and they “suspended activity” in 2019.
UK-born, Berlin-resident The Underground Youth get labeled as post-punk, but echo-and-reverb drenched “Underground” seems pretty shoegazey to me, and a bit like Civic’s “Innocent.”
This is off their album Mademoiselle, which is available through iTunes.
Ozean’s “Scenic” was featured as part of a three song set quite a while back, but here it is on it’s own, accompanied by (mostly) quite beautiful AI-generated art.
Basically, AI generated art is now better than 95% of all self-published trade paperback art.
Glixen evidently hales from Phoenix, and that’s about all I know about them. Except the fact that they make some tasty, fuzzy noise.