The Halloween season is upon us again!
This video features a complete play-through of Isle of Eras, which starts out as a search for a missing brother and quickly morphs into a weird cosmic horror/time travel game with giant monsters and nods to everything from Donnie Darko to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s amazingly elaborate for an indie game put together by a tiny team. The monster design is particularly impressive.
Available for PS4/5 and PC (but not, alas, Mac).
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.)
Here’s another song off Slowdive’s forthcoming Everything is Alive album, due out September 1st.
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.
Hyperlilly 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.
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.
I 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.
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.
A 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.