Shoegaze?

Just curious if I’ll draw anyone out of the late 80’s/early 90’s woodwork here. Comments on any of the following groups?

Lush
My Bloody Valentine
Swervedriver
Ride
Slowdive
Pale Saints
Boo Radleys
Chapterhouse
Catherine Wheel

I was a big fan of Lush. I also liked the Pale Saints and My Bloody Valentine.

Sadly, I don’t think many of these groups are still around.

For me, I guess Lush tops the list (as it did on your list, though you might have just listed the groups at random).

Not much to add now, but I look forward to reading what others will add.

[quote=“fee”]I was a big fan of Lush. I also liked the Pale Saints and My Bloody Valentine.

Sadly, I don’t think many of these groups are still around.

For me, I guess Lush tops the list (as it did on your list, though you might have just listed the groups at random).

Not much to add now, but I look forward to reading what others will add.[/quote]
The list was random, actually.

I think the demise of the whole “movement” was there all along right from the beginning, as there’s only so much you can do with the notion of a “swirling wall of sound.” The limitations are evident the moment you hear any of the bands, but there’s no less sonic joy in how dated they are for all that.

The ultimate album, of course, is the epic “Loveless” by My Bloody Valentine in 1991. I think it blew pretty much everyone away, including the other groups who were labelled part of the genre. I mean, there’s just no topping that one.

The importance of My Bloody Valentine is hard to contest, but I never really got into the others on the list… maybe a couple Lush songs, even though they seemed more image-based and lacking in the all-engulfing melodic swirl department. I was too young when Loveless came out, but Slowdive’s Souvlaki definitely changed my adolescent life. I paid over $30USD for their Pygmalion, probably one of the most expensive non-Japanese CDs in my collection. The completist in me still felt it necessary to duplicate my collection and get the 2CD compilation that recently came out. Slowdive = my favorite shoegazer band. Period.

There’s also a good 2CD compilation, Blue Skied an’ Clear, put out on Morr Music in 2002. One CD is all Slowdive covers by the likes of Lali Puna, Solvent, B. Fleishmann, Mum, Styrofoam, Isan … and the second CD takes you through the works of those same contemporary artists that have been heavily influenced by shoegazer aesthetics.

Lenola, southpacific, and M83 are some others that have sort of tried to revive the shoegazer sound… some more successfully than others. But it’s not really a sound you should directly duplicate, you know? I like how porcelainprincess said it … it’s an aesthetic style with limitations, but hit the right combination, and it’s pure sonic bliss.

All things considered, a very, very minor blip on rock history’s radar. One classic album - Loveless - , a few singles here and there, that’s it. Like most '80s music sounds dated in hindsight. I liked Swervedriver but they were a lot more heavy metal than the rest of those bands. Funny how the movement ground to an immediate halt once Brit-pop took off, killing off all of those bands. UK music is so flavour of the month.

Was a fan of all these bands above except Lush and the Boo Radleys… Loveless is still a classic and Swervedriver still rank as one of my favoutire most powerful live music experiences.

Quite a diverse ‘where are they now’ list for this lot… for example.

Adam Franklin from Swervedriver now lives a hermits life in San Fran, Kevin Shields does soundtrack work (see Lost in Translation)… Andy Bell from Ride plays bass for Oasis… and Neil Halstead from Chapterhouse now fronts Mojave 3 - a sort of folky alt country ensemble.

Pop music (for lack of a better term–meaning everything outside of jazz and classical) in the UK is a sonic universe of a cornucopia unrivalled by any other country, save perhaps for the U.S. One might say that things tend to come and go so quickly because there’s just so damn much happening there.

Yes, it sounds dated. But, then, all music sounds dated. I love Stereolab, for example, but they exist in a magical mid-1990s moment of farfisa madness, and ever will. Or perhaps some music sounds more dated than others? An interesting topic for another thread, that: which bands/singers still sound fresh at the cusp of 2006?

And while the shoegaze genre was only a blip on the radar in North America (which is surely what you meant, or, at least, should have meant), well…what of it? Popularity has never been a good barometer for quality or enjoyability where I’m concerned. In fact, as an unabashed aesthetic elitist of a particular bent, the denizens of the top of the charts and the best-seller lists tend to not interest me much, because the people driving the sales are typically 14 year-old girls. Or, various darlings of the critics bore me to tears–the American hardcore scene of the 1980s in its entirety, say. Or “Seattle.” Or Wilco. Retch.

Blip or no blip, in the oeuvres of the groups in my list are real, genuine moments of aural bliss and euphoria that I have yet to hear matched by other bands.

[quote=“porcelainprincess”]Just curious if I’ll draw anyone out of the late 80’s/early 90’s woodwork here. Comments on any of the following groups?

Catherine Wheel[/quote] I had this band recently described to me as being overproduced and mining the vein of Bush B-sides. They were described by the same person as being a guilty pleasure.

Were they NME darlings like the other bands on the list? I’ve only heard little bits from most of those bands. During the time I was passing on most bands that the UK media super-hyped up as the next big thing.

[quote=“Matchstick_man”][quote=“porcelainprincess”]Just curious if I’ll draw anyone out of the late 80’s/early 90’s woodwork here. Comments on any of the following groups?

Catherine Wheel[/quote]
I had this band recently described to me as being overproduced and mining the vein of Bush B-sides. They were described by the same person as being a guilty pleasure.

Were they NME darlings like the other bands on the list? I’ve only heard little bits from most of those bands. During the time I was passing on most bands that the UK media super-hyped up as the next big thing.[/quote]
Being Canadian and never having read any music press anywhere, I wouldn’t know about that. I can certainly see how hype can be nausea-inducing, though. I think Catherine Wheel are the least worthy on the list, and at times veer dangerously close to Nirvana et al. (shudder). I don’t have them on high rotation.

Interestingly enough, the advent of music downloading means that I’ve had the opportunity to fill out the back catalogues for some of the groups that I never heard that much of the first time around. So I’m actually listening more to this stuff now at my computer (I work at home–neener neener neener) than I did back in 1990, say. My sense is that a lot of it has lasting power, though that could also be more a function of my age and particular tastes.

[quote=“Matchstick_man”][quote=“porcelainprincess”]Just curious if I’ll draw anyone out of the late 80’s/early 90’s woodwork here. Comments on any of the following groups?

Catherine Wheel[/quote] I had this band recently described to me as being overproduced and mining the vein of Bush B-sides.[/quote]

The Catherine Wheel were around along time before Bush came along and made people ill with their trite pseudo-indie toons.

[quote=“porcelainprincess”]Just curious if I’ll draw anyone out of the late 80’s/early 90’s woodwork here. Comments on any of the following groups?

Lush
My Bloody Valentine
Swervedriver
Ride
Slowdive
Pale Saints
Boo Radleys
Chapterhouse
Catherine Wheel[/quote]

Nice to know I’m not the only one! Aah happy memories, 16 years-old, dodgy long hair and sitting in my bedroom listening to shoegazing music.
Ride were always my favourite, they were the first band I ever saw and their first two albums were great (before they became a pale Oasis rip-off).
MBV were (obviously) great, and I actually picked up the best of Slowdive in Eslite the other day and it still sounds surprisingly good.

hmmm… rides last 2 records were released in 94 and 96 repsectively… live they were sounding like oasis before oasis were on the scene. noel gallagher has admitted that both tarantula and carnival of light were inspirations for oasis and were part of the reason andy bell was asked to join ride in recent times. in fact, i love tarantula, andy bell wrote the lions share of the tunes and his guitar work is lovely.