Here’s another song off Slowdive’s forthcoming Everything is Alive album, due out September 1st.
Posts Tagged ‘video’
Shoegazer Sunday: Slowdive’s “Skin in the Game”
Sunday, August 20th, 202340 Years Ago Today: Genesis Releases “Mama”
Saturday, August 19th, 2023Forty 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.
Shoegazer Sunday: hyperlilly’s “springs (the oracle)”
Sunday, June 11th, 2023Hyperlilly evidently hale from Cologne, Germany. Not a fan of the video (static band shots + mild psych color filters), but the song reminds me of Auburn Lull crossed with a bit of M83.
Shoegazer Sunday: Kinoko Teikoku’s Musician
Sunday, June 4th, 2023Been 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.
Wes Anderson’s Star Wars
Thursday, May 4th, 2023I checked out of Star Wars after The Force Awakens was just “meh” and everyone told me the sequels were much worse and Disney proceeded to screw every single pooch. But here’s a Star Wars movie I would totally watch:
Consider this your May the 4th post.
Shoegazer Sunday: Ozean’s “Scenic”
Sunday, April 9th, 2023Ozean’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.
Shoegazer Sunday: Chromatics Cover of “Petals”
Sunday, March 26th, 2023A few weeks ago, I heard a more modern song whose melodic structure really reminded me of Hole’s “Petals,” which meant it’s been running through my head a lot recently. And then I found out that The Chromatics had covered it for a movie soundtrack.
It’s not exactly Shoegaze, but I think it might qualify as Dreampop.
One problem though: It’s only half the song. Here’s the original:
Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins fame wrote the music, but I think Courtney Love wrote the lyrics. Despite her well-documented personal problems, she was occasionally a very good lyricist, back in the day.
French New Wave Steamed Hams
Saturday, February 25th, 2023For a while, there was an “X, but it’s Y” trend on YouTube, where people would take something familiar and alter it in presumably amusing ways. (I think “every time they say bee it gets faster” is one of the better known examples of the trope.)
The Skinner-Chalmers “Steamed Hams” scene from The Simpsons has been the source of a lot of these videos. Most of them don’t do anything for me, but for some reason, “Steamed Hams, but it’s the French New Wave” tickled my fancy.
Shoegazer Sunday: Beach House’s “Space Song”
Sunday, January 8th, 2023It’s been a while since I did one of these, and more than seven years since I did a Beach House song, so here’s “Space Song,” featuring footage of a science fiction film I bet you’re familiar with.
Halloween Horrors: The Backrooms
Sunday, October 30th, 2022The Backrooms are a liminal space CreepyPasta setting where you’ve “no clipped” out of reality into and endless office maze of office corridors decorated in ugly yellow wallpaper and brown carpets illuminated by buzzing florescent lights.
Several video creators have run with this idea and produced some pretty convincing depictions of it. In the ones below, YouTuber Kane Parsons, AKA Kane Pixals, has filled in background lore where the Async Corporation has created (or possibly tapped into) The Backrooms as a potential money-making project, documenting their work as bland, 1980s-corporate speak promotional videos and handheld camera footage that have come down to us as grainy VHS copies. It’s a pretty-inspired mating of presentation format and subject.
And the people exploring the Backrooms start to realize that the deeper you get, the weirder things seem to be, and that there’s something else wandering those yellow hallways…
Evidently he’s doing all this in Blender, which you can download for free.
And there are lots more YouTube creators doing their own versions of the Backrooms…