Shoegazing playlist page on YouTube
Someone asked about a shoegazing playlist and I've been more than happy to assemble this on YouTube.
When punk and new wave happened, I was still a kid and while I remember the TV showing something of those scenes, I had to discover everything when their most glorious moments had gone.
Still, when I got into music in the second half of the 80s, many bands like New Order, Depeche Mode, Cocteau Twins and The Smiths were still on great form and releasing some of their best albums.
When I was about to turn 18 I liked baggy bands like Happy Mondays or Northside, but something else was keeping me busy: alternative radio and TV programs were showing the videos of these new bands coming from a label called Creation, I had started reading the NME and apparently this new fantastic sound they were doing was called
Shoegazing, and you should know why, if not check Wikipedia.
This was the first and last great scene I really saw happening in England (I remember how it was exciting to buy My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Swevedriver albums in the same week) before the media attention turned to mediocre and derivative Britpop bands ruining forever the English music scene, which basically never recovered since then. There have been other great bands, like Radiohead, and other great scenes in America and especially in Italy, where the second half of the 90s has been amazingly more exciting than in England, but we had got used to labels like Factory, 4AD and Creation introducing us to great new bands and that wasn't happening anymore and nobody took their place. Actually Factory had to shut down, 4AD turned to boring indie folk and Creation was a key label in the same Britpop scene which destroyed Shoegazing. It was appalling to see the same label who released the last My Bloody Valentine album, in 1991, releasing the Oasis debut album three years later, mostly because it sounded like recorded 25 years before the MBV album.
This playlist opens with
Slowdive, simply because Shine (though the embedded player in this post doesn't show it, but you can find it on the playlist page) is not only the most beautiful shoegazing song ever, but has also possibly the most beautiful video ever. Slow is my favourite
My Bloody Valentine song,
Swervedriver look incredibly cool in the Sandblasted video,
Moose's Boy just proves what they could have done had they not turned to Britpop in a vain attempt to survive. The same must be said for
Ride,
Lush and
The Boo Radleys. Autosleeper by
Chapterhouse is a truly emotional song. There are songs by
Pale Saints which sound more shoegazing than Two Sick Sisters, but I chose it simply because I've always found it wonderfully frightening.
Then we have the shoegazing one hit wonder department, with
Revolver,
Drop Nineteens (from USA) and
Adorable, three great songs, especially the amazing Venice, but basically their only truly great songs, followed by disappointing albums and even more disappointing sales.
Bands like
The Swirlies and
Curve would have deserved more though, but by the mid 90s even excellent albums by Slowdive and Swervedriver were getting ignored, or worse, unfairly derided, in favour of silly Britpop bands, the very most of which today don't have a cult following of people of different age like those shoegazing bands do.
But this playlist has a positive feeling: shoegazing as we knew it ended back then, except for contemporary nu gaze revivalism bands like
Airiel, but its influence has been strong on very different music genres: you heard it in the mid-90s in
Flying Saucer Attack's lo-fi noise, or in
Seefeel's and
Bowery Electric ethereal vision of dub, you heard it in the 2000s in bands like
Mew, described as "My Bloody Valentine meet Prefab Sprout", only from a prog persepective, and today you can hear
M83 singing a synth pop tune with vocals recalling Slowdive and being remixed by dubstep-fidget genius Udachi, or if you prefer guitar indie there's the best debut album of this century so far by
Exit Calm.
The spirit and heritage of shoegazing is stronger than 20 years ago.
Slowdive - Shine
My Bloody Valentine - Slow
Swervedriver - Sandblasted
MOOSE - Boy
Chapterhouse - Autosleeper
Ride- Dreams burn down
Lush | De Luxe
Pale Saints - Two Sick Sisters
The Boo Radleys "kaleidoscope"
Revolver - "Venice" live at ULU May 1992
Drop Nineteens - Winona
Adorable - Sunshine Smile
The Swirlies - Sounds of sebring
Curve - Horror Head
Flying Saucer Attack - Always
Seefeel - Charlotte`s mouth
Bowery Electric - Fear of Flying
Mew - Apocalypso
Airiel - Peoria
M83 - We Own The Sky (Udachi Remix)
Exit Calm - You've Got It All Wrong - FAC251 - 11/06/2010
