Here’s Echodrone’s “Under an Impressive Sky,” with a video assembled from lots of tasty atomic testing footage (which, if I’m not mistaken, is from the 29 kiloton Apple-2 atomic test performed under Operation Teapot on May 5, 1955 (5/5/55).)
For more Echodrone, see here.
For more information on atomic testing, see Samuel Glasstone’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.
Today’s dose of Shoegaze comes to you from all-girl Canadian Shoegaze duo No Joy for their song “Pacific Pride.”
Interestingly, their video seems to be taken entirely from the 1966 Czech surrealist/absurdest film Daisies, which I was previously unaware of, but which seems to have quite a cult following. It shows up on the list of 1,001 movies to see before you die (which is a pretty good list), and looking at clips, it’s tempting to say that acid arrived in Czechoslovakia a year before the Summer of Love, as it looks pretty trippy, a film where the sixties became The Sixties. It also appears to be part of the Criterion collection Eclipse Series 32: Pearls of the Czech New Wave.
I think I’m going to have to see this some time.
The whole film is available on YouTube so, hey, here it is.
Looks like you’ll need some 3D glasses for part of it…
Here’s another beautiful song from Japan’s Lemon’s Chair. However, “Swallowtail,” unlike most of their songs, is available in the U.S. on iTunes, and I think it’s my favorite of their work.
This is the fourth Lemon’s Chair song I’ve put up, and yes, I like them a lot.
Get’s a little mopey in the middle, but otherwise a nice solid, slow-tempo Shoegazer song.
SummerMay hails from Zurich, which, judging from the video, seems to be colored entirely in pastels.
In mentioning the unreleased Peter Gabriel tracks I had put up here to a couple of other bloggers, I suddenly realized that it had been a year since I put one up. Well, that’s too long?
How about an entire unreleased Peter Gabriel demo album? Before the Flood were mostly piano and voice tracks Gabriel recorded after leaving Genesis, but way before Peter Gabriel I was released. Early versions of “Excuse Me” and “Here Comes the Flood” appear, but there are also five Peter Gabriel tracks (“Howling At The Moon,” “Funny Man,””No More Mickey,” “Get The Guns,” and “God Knows”) that have never seen the light of day.
The End of the Ocean labels themselves post-rock, and some of their work is a bit noodly for my taste, but this one hits a nice melodic shoegaze sweet spot.
The only reason this isn’t perfect is that no one has the pure upper tenor Art Garfunkel has. But right now it’s only a 360 hits. By the end of the month I bet it’s over a million.
I picked up Malory’s album Outerbeats and I’m enjoying it quite a bit. It’s about halfway between ambient and shoegaze, with a tiny bit of lounge jazz thrown in every now and then. Great end-of-the-day music.
Here’s “Falling Shine.”
And the Thrushes kick continues with “Crystal”!
You may already know of my affection for Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You,” and a couple of week’s ago I put up a Thrushes song, so naturally a Thrushes cover of “Fade Into You” peaked my interest.
The nice thing about this version is that it foregrounds the similarities with Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” and if anything is more wistfully melancholy than the original. The only flaw is that lead singer Anna Conner, while good, just isn’t Hope Sandoval. But who is?