dust off yuh boots, shoegazing is back in vogue

[The Dr]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/ap ... in-fashion


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


Cheatahs
Grungy London shoeys Cheatahs show they've got sole.

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".

That's not to say that this oft-revived sound isn't great – thanks to my older sister, I'm a sucker for Ride, Slowdive and Ultra Vivid Scene – but its longevity is surprising. Looking back over all those documentaries about Britpop and grunge, and the number of HMV bargain bin books devoted to acid house and Madchester, it's bizarre to think that shoegazing, considered the wimpiest of all the 90s' musical scenes, is the one now thriving in a post-Pitchfork world.

Even the term itself was conjured up as an insult by the boss of Food Records (Blur, Idlewild, er, Jesus Jones) to dismiss what he saw as fey, wall-of-reverb enthusiasts, hiding behind their fringes and staring glumly at the floor (see what he did there?). But who's having the last laugh now? (Clue: it's not Jesus Jones.)

"It was when 'shoegaze' was given as a genre option on MySpace that it became acceptable to label your music in that way," reckons Nathaniel Cramp of Sonic Cathedral. "Suddenly it could be used as a descriptive term, without all the negative connotations it would have had 10 years earlier."

For Cramp, the music is pure escapism, "a warm, enveloping, all-encompassing noise". For fans of Berlin's Einstürzende Neubauten, owners of my fave 'gaze anecdote, the current state of shogaze is a bit more confusing.

"You rock!" shouted one fan when the band played ATP recently.

"We are not rock," shouted back frontman Blixa Bargeld. "We are shoegaze; look at your fucking shoes!"