Review Summary: Ultimate shoegaze heart attack
Shoegaze is what you make of it. What have people made of it? A load of other stuff, it turns out. Skim through your favourites and you’ll see how keen most gazers were to harness the genre’s central traits to the infrastructure of pop (Lush, The Radio Dept), rock (Swervedriver, Catherine Wheel) or goodness knows what else (Sweet Trip, Coaltar of the Deepers). The (shoegaze)(secondary genre) generality has a load of great stories wrapped up in it; there’s a time and place for these and this is wonderful…
but, what happened to ‘pure’ gaze? Where are the bands that heard
Loveless’ wall-of-sound and thought to double down on it, to embrace its homogeneous dynamics, bedheaded delivery and numbing repetition as mesmeric blessings with nary a hint of mitigation? What’s the tale of (shoegaze)(shoegaze)?
Scott Cortez has done more than most in answer to that question, exploring the specificities of shoegaze aesthetics under various aliases. His most famous project, Lovesliescrushing, distills the genre’s ethereal side into blissful ambience, while as Transient Stellar he complements similar reveries with atmospheric drum and bass. Both shrug off My Bloody Valentine et al.’s typical reliance on verse/chorus rock songwriting, drifting instead into gossamer formlessness a’ la “To Here Knows When”. That sound (and indeed that song) suggest one possibility for ‘pure’ shoegaze: they afford it a more abstract voicing where its natural inclinations towards drone and noise bloom in their own space. Anyone invested in the genre’s more atmospheric side, take heed.
Astrobrite comes in from the other extreme, atomising that inescapable pink fuzz into nuggets of woozy noise pop euphoria, decibelled to frankly absurd magnitudes and repeated at the expense of everything in the human psyche. Rapture for the spirit; ruin for the ears. It’s bracing in the way of rock and immediate in the way of pop, but there’s something about the way Cortez’s oblique levels of languor and treatment of both song structure and development as afterthoughts that evades the brief of either. It doesn’t rock and it doesn’t pop; it’s loud and soft and saccharine and disgusting and satiating and grating and comforting and graceful and lazy and altogether too much but also a unique kind of perfect. It is shoegaze.
Pinkshinyultrablast is the culmination of this sound, bolder and more robust than Astrobrite’s debut
Crush while lighter on the electronics and scorching walls of noise than their appropriately titled following album
White Noise Superstar. Though it’s clear that a considerable amount of attention went into its tone department, it’s a deeply straightforward record in most ways, using the simplest of on/off songwriting devices as a foundation for syrupy motifs, swirling livewire distortion and tentatively melodious crooning: the usual culprits, but louder and, uh, more ___. They come in thick and fast from the onset, blurring together for a seemingly indefinite length of time as though by design; jump in at the right moment, and it’s a protracted swoon.
Never disrupt a swoon: I don’t much care to parse this record down to individual tracks, my highlights and lowlights shift with every listen, and there’s only so much to be gained by comparing and contrasting within a record dedicated to a single approach. Gun to my head, “More”, a near-prophetic precursor to MBV’s crowning masterpiece “She Found Now”, is the prettiest cut and best mixtape pick, but, as with a lot of truly great albums, the best way to start is anywhere. The only section that lands with a consistency of sorts for me is the final stretch. “Pinkyshiny” is a gorgeous closer, equal parts “Avalyn” and “Dagger”, and impeccably bedroom-ready in its mope, but the two prior tracks pull the album’s limitations into focus: “Please”’s scuzzy pseudo-acapella mantra should probably make for something gripping but feels more like a glorified interlude, while “Cherrybomb” is a lysergic marathon and frankly too fucking much on every single front. Somewhere along the way, that album-long stupor acquires an expiry date: it’s the kind of endgame run that feels so satisfying in no small part because it telegraphs that the album very much
needs to end.
If the paradox there doesn’t speak to the kind of gratification on offer, I don’t know what does. This is absolutely not a record for everyone: it feeds off a very particular brand of excess that sounds better the more it hurts your ears; its layerings are most impressive when they’re too dense to distinguish; the whole thing is nigh on perfectly crafted precisely because it establishes a slapdash tone more pervasive than the most insistent central heating. Is there a dissonance floating around there? Who cares; in the right mood, this is as good as it gets. I don’t think any record has convinced me so firmly that shoegaze’s ultimate mission is to capture the destruction of the universe as experienced by an ego-dead pair of lovers in a sweaty haze somewhere between opiated ineptitude and sluggish erotic climax - close your eyes at the right moment and you can practically taste the sugar on their tongues. We could spend all day on prosaic approximations of that rush, but after a certain point it’s just intuitive: this album feels to me like what I always thought shoegaze was supposed to feel like. Now you know why. Perfect mess.
