Tag: Shoegaze

Categories
Vinyl

Vinyl love: Ride “Nowhere”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: Ride
Album Title: Nowhere
Year released: 1990
Year reissued: 2010
Details: 180 gram

The skinny: A Facebook friend invited me to do one of those things where you post a picture a day for 10 days and then invite 10 of your own friends to do the same. Normally, I don’t go in for those things but in this case, I couldn’t resist choosing, revisiting, and sharing the pics of 10 albums in my vinyl collection that had a great impact on me and my musical tastes. So today was day ten and this album here is the final album cover I posted to my Facebook wall for this exercise: Ride’s “Nowhere”. It’s not very often that I agree with Pitchfork’s assessment of a song (see hype sticker above) and a band, but Ride”s debut and the single shared below are definitely amongst the greatest moments in the original shoegaze movement. This reissue was pressed by Rhino Records back on the album’s 20th anniversary and is of the original track list. Eight songs, all of them mighty.

Standout track: “Vapour trail”

Categories
Live music galleries

Live music galleries: Ottawa Bluesfest 2019, day five – Scary Bear Soundtrack

(Since I’ll be too busy attending Ottawa Bluesfest over the next week or so to continue with this blog’s regularly scheduled programming, I thought I would do a special ‘live galleries’ series this week to share some pics from some of the sets I am enjoying.)

Entrance to Bluesville

Artist: Scary Bear Soundtrack
When: July 9th, 2019
Where: Lebreton Flats Park, Ottawa
Some words: This’ll be a short and sweet one.

I hadn’t actually planned on attended Tuesday night but an early set by a local band caught my eye. The name, Scary Bear Sountrack, was a fun one that aroused my curiosity. However, it was the influences of dream poppers My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins, and Canadian indie stalwarts, Stars, that drew me right in.

And that’s the beauty of having a festival pass. One can choose to stop in after work for one band, a local one that may be heretofore unheard of, without a great commitment, rock out at the front of the Bluesville stage and go home at a decent hour, satisfied.

And so that is what happened.

To sum up, many of you outside of Ottawa, or if you’re lucky, Canada, may never get the chance, but if you do and you love any of the aforementioned influences, go check out Scary Bear Soundtrack. The local five piece led by Gloria Guns put on a great set for these ears, three part female vocal harmonies and plenty of noisy guitars and washy synths.

Scary Bear Soundtrack

“Trevor”

Gloria Guns of Scary Bear Soundtrack
Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 2011: #11 I Break Horses “Winter beats”

<< #12    |    #10 >>

Shoegaze was a subgenre I loved way back in the day (though I likely joined the train just as it was coming to a skidding and screaming stop) so when I started to hear bands incorporating that sound into their music in the mid- to late-2000s, I got pretty excited. And though I never thought much of the term ‘nugaze’, I definitely latched on to a lot these revivalists, of which I Break Horses is but one fine example.

From what I’ve read, the Swedish duo of Maria Lindén and Fredrik Balck named themselves after a Bill Callahan/Smog song. Other than that piece of trivia, there’s little else to be found about them, other than the obvious: the names of their two albums, they haven’t released new material in quite a few years, etc. However, I can say that the debut album “Hearts” is a thing of real beauty and around the time it came out, I couldn’t say enough about it. Yeah, I did my damnedest to spread the word. When I got the chance to see them the year following its release, during their tour as support to M83, I jumped at it and tried to convince all of my friends to join me. Unfortunately, this was an uphill task since the majority of my concert-going buddies were going to the same Spiritualized show as I was on the day prior. It was their loss because my second concert in as many nights was just as good as the first.

“Winter beats”, the opening track on “Hearts”, is a thrilling piece of music. It takes the roar and rage of My Bloody Valentine and ups the synth quotient, looping washes and frenetic drum machine crashes, and effects morphed vocals. Oh my. Yes. It is a roaring animal of a thing, flashing strobes, smoke machines, and lasers all over the place, while two silhouettes are up on stage, perhaps one is male and the other female, but you are unsure. Indeed, they are only just barely visible through the smoke and mirrors. You could almost swear the song was conjured up from the ephemera by a machine. Or a ghost. Or an alien.

You could almost swear it might very nearly swallow you up whole. But there are worse fates, I’d wager.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2011 list, click here.