Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Vera Violets - Sunshine Dust CD
Got a Vera Violets CD from Tonevendor (psssst. it’s only $7!) and it’s damn good. My interpretation of the style would be a sort of shoegazing Beat Happening.
I love how the vocals are amateurish in that they are pure, unfiltered, and unaffected. Too many bands/artists these days rely on effects to make their vocal tone perfect. There’s only too much perfection I can take. It’s just like reading an alphabetized list of your collection, you’re bound to miss something by knowing what order it’s in. When things are too perfect, you start taking for granted the little things inbetween.
Overall, it’s well worth your money. There’s nineteen tracks!
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Pygmalion on eBay
I was looking for Pygmalion on eBay and found this wonderful review of the album:
Stock review by Ned Raggett 10/99 Bliss. Out. This one might as well be called the death of shoegazing for the simple reason that it did more or less herald the end of a certain era where ‘Creation’ = ‘MBV and after.’ A couple of months later Oasis scored its first UK number one single, and from then on it was left to the North American, European and Australian obsessives to fly the flag on their own. To a great degree they’ve succeeded; from Bethany Curve to Silvania to Sianspheric, it echoes on and on and along.
Ned Raggett 10/99 But this album, then. Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell turned their back on electric guitar wash firmly after this point, forming the not bad at all but nowhere near what it could be Mojave 3 instead. The overdrive of their early singles was long past. Here was nothing much if you called Sheer Outright Beauty nothing much. Opening track “Rutti” doesn’t immediately give as much away, even if it is a spacious, empty track that takes up a full fifth of the record’s running time. And it is nice, to be sure. But then “Crazy for You” hits and you remember if you were me why the Scene That Celebrates Itself wasn’t just Steve Sutherland japing in the pages of Melody Maker as you searched for something mindblowing with Manchester being a joke and Nirvana and Suede being unknown nonentities. If you were me, you were Anglophilic to a fault and didn’t damn well care how bad things might really be over there or not, because you were in LA and hearing albums that sounded like gentle storm washes and grey post-goth moodiness were exactly the difference in style and scene you needed, so you thought. You were probably right too. And is it any coincidence that a song on this record is called “Visions of LA”? Or is that “Visions of La”? Works either way. “Crazy for You” builds and builds and builds, but never amps up; the feedback reverbs and echoes and reverbs again, the drums quietly but firmly pound along, there’s a lovely acoustic riff repeating itself that you can hear if you listen carefully, and Neil gently sings the title again and again and you feel lovedrunk if you really are and transported away even if you’re not. It makes you wish that they had toured instead of breaking up, you cling to the regrets. You have to. The tunes are generally simple, minimal, lost and calm. They have gentle guitar pluckings at the center and oceans of reverb around them; cue the music critic metaphor overdrive! Caverns, fog-bound forests, it’s no wonder Slowdive were post-goth, for what else could fit what they were really doing (and what could be expected from a band named after a Siouxsie song and that worshipped at the feet of the Cure and New Order by their own particular confession?)? Rachel’s and Neil’s voices get exquisitely lost and dislocated as much as the music, and what more could I want in the mid-decade? The most basic of guitar strums sound momentous in context, thus the start of “Trellisaze.” Wonderful, wonderful. Gregg Araki had the good taste to license “Blue Skied an’ Clear” for The Doom Generation soundtrack, ensuring that at least something made it over the States officially. I would have just gone ahead and done the whole album. Music for Fitzgerald adaptations if he was from the 90s. And why not? I’m into beautiful, resigned loss. Love the drama.
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