![]() ![]() Instead of chasing shoegaze oblivion, Pale Saints usually wallowed in melancholy their music might’ve earned a different genre descriptor if they hadn’t formed in Leeds during the late ’80s. The brief overlap in their tenures was a golden age for the band, culminating with In Ribbons, an album of such sulky charisma that Option magazine crowned the co-vocalists “the Glimmer Twins minus the heroin.” By the time they recorded their final LP, 1994’s Slow Buildings, the founding frontman and bassist Ian Masters had left. Pale Saints had already released their debut, The Comforts of Madness, when Lush’s former singer Meriel Barham joined the lineup in late 1990. Listen: Bowery Electric: “Next to Nothing” The debut was the perfect realization of their aesthetic, each word and chord tuned and focused for maximum impact. Their 1996 album, Beat, is almost as good as their debut, incorporating then-trendy breakbeats in an organic way, while their 2000 swan song Lushlife finds them trying too hard to be fashionable, sounding like a demo reel for commercial synch opportunities. This design-heavy approach meant that they’d later be quite comfortable in the world of head-nodding trip-hop. Though the guitars on their 1995 self-titled debut are plenty loud and heavy, the music also has a cool distance to it, a tension that is always bubbling under but never fully explodes. Bowery Electric, a New York City-based rock band formed by Lawrence Chandler and Martha Schwendener, favored a kind of steely precision. ![]() Shoegaze balances control and chaos the noise of an electric guitar feeding back always feels like it could explode at any moment and in a fit of atonal noise, but the right performer knows how to steer the din where the music needs it to go. Listen: A Place to Bury Strangers: “To Fix the Gash in Your Head” Shoegaze may be stereotyped as pretty and sad, but A Place to Bury Strangers reassert that the genre has always cleared a little space for the twisted and transgressive. Accordingly, songs like “To Fix the Gash in Your Head” revel in ultraviolence, sadomasochistic perversity, and a machinelike edge that borders on the industrial. In their place, Ackermann mixed sugary melodies with the harshest output of his formidable, home-built effects pedals. Armed with deafening waves of Psychocandy-esque noise and pounding, elemental beats, singer/guitarist Oliver Ackermann and crew unleashed a razor-sharp cacophony that slashed away shoegaze’s gauzier tendencies. In that sense, A Place to Bury Strangers got back to basics with their self-titled debut of that year. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s position as a proto-shoegaze band had long been cemented by 2007-and yet, few young shoegaze bands were drawing direct inspiration from them. ![]() On Antarctica, the duo stakes a claim for the only continent without a musical tradition of its own. Without the distraction of lyrics, Windy & Carl, two Michigan record store owners, answer the central question of shoegaze: What’s down there? As drone musicians, throat singers, and overtone-lovers around the world know: everything. Three albums into a discography that would influence bands like Deerhunter, the shapes of “Sunrise” suggest ambient music as much as hidden beach-pop hymns. ![]() Where 1996’s Drawing of Sound submerged Windy’s vocals and shimmering songforms in great, open spaces sans percussion, Antarctica lives entirely in the space between Weber and Hultgren’s guitars. Similar to their fellow husband/wife noisemakers in Yo La Tengo, Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren find ways to be quiet and loud at the same time, their overtones and oscillations creating secret melodies well suited for closed-eye contemplation. Windy & Carl keep their feet in the clouds and stare downwards on Antarctica, three extended instrumental tracks that detail icy patterns so vivid, they seem to transform into language. ![]()
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