Dreamy. Definition enough. Urban Dictionary adds: A
style of music that emerged in England in the late 80s featuring blisteringly loud and dreamily reverberated feedback, recently revived by
electronic bands like M83 and Ulrich Schnauss. Pinning it down: psychedelic,
drug induced euphoria, trippy; indeed, dreamy, definition enough. The
argument arises: who defines the genre best? For this writer, Cocteau Twins.
For others, My Bloody Valentine, This Mortal Coil, Lush. Oh, and the name itself?
Artists staring at their shoes.
Suffused with swirling, disorienting, blearily processed
guitar, the style coalesced from a cloud of influences in the 80s (in particular the Cocteau Twins' first release in 1984, Treasure (AM7), alongside the 4AD project, This Mortal Coil) when My
Bloody Valentine released its game-changing album Isn't Anything (AM6). Imperviously
heavy and sweetly melodic, it quickly inspired a glut of soundalikes—although
there were other random antecedents. Drawing on atmospheric post-punk and droning psychedelia, Shoegaze received an extra boost of inspiration from the U.S. underground
scene, most notably big-guitar groups like Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth. Shoegaze
rose in a parallel arc to the similarly trippy Madchester sound, but where
Madchester was outgoing, Shoegaze was introverted (once again the name, originally
meant as a derogatory term referring to the scene's notoriously shy stage
presence). After reaching its apotheosis with My Bloody Valentine's 1991
masterpiece, Loveless, Shoegaze petered out, but not with regard to influence (once again the hipster/college ideology comes into play; Shoegaze today is a hipster thing, the kind of music they'd play in the background if Portland, Oregon was a movie).
The gold standard of Shoegaze, My Bloody Valentine’s
Loveless (AM8) is overshadowed by its own towering reputation (that happens). Set aside the story of
its long, legendary creation and numerous innovations and iterations, and what's left is a
batch of dreamy, beautiful pop that gets lost in the
hyperbole. It's true that mastermind Kevin Shields spent years painstakingly
perfecting the album in the studio, and that the sampling and recording
techniques he used changed guitar rock forever, but
Loveless, gorgeous as it is, stands as more a frozen moment than the
beginning of an epoch.
