Shoegaze:
the
genre that could not be killed
Formerly a UK
music press term of abuse for hapless Thames Valley indie types who hid behind
their fringes, now everyone's glad to be 'gaze
Shoegaze is
back! Or, to be precise, it's been drifting past us in waves – how apt – ever
since Sofia Coppola got Kevin Shields to pull his finger out for the Lost
In Translation soundtrack in 2003. Twelve months later, revivalist
club night-turned-label Sonic
Cathedral opened its doors in an east London bar. Come 2007, the
Guardian was dubbing its young disciples as, um, "nu-gaze"; and by
2009, the Sunday Times too was celebrating the genre that wouldn't die,
profiling bands united by a love for the same five albums and appreciation of a
good flange pedal (oh yes, it's real).
And so to
2013. My Bloody Valentine, grandaddies of 'gaze, finally release the album they
started 17 years ago and suddenly, somehow, along comes a massive wang of new
bands sounding like music's equivalent of mumblecore: dreamy, indecipherable,
vaguely nostalgic. Cheatahs, Younghusband, Echo Lake, DIIV, Teen, Wild Nothing,
Melody's Echo Chamber... We could spend this entire page, and more,
name-checking bands heavily influenced by "the scene that celebrates
itself", and knocking out the kind of noise that music hacks invariably
rush to describe as "woozy". Or "fuzzy". Or sometimes, when
it all goes a bit Cocteau Twins, "ethereal"...
-Dan Joy
