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"We tried to sorta marry punk rock and psychedelia, that’s what we were really trying to do," said Alan McGee, co-founder of Creation Records, in the 2014 documentary Beautiful Noise. "It’s no more complicated than that, to be honest."
Perhaps the aural mist of '80s and '90s shoegaze obscures what is, by McGee’s estimation, a simple 1+1=2 scenario of genre fusion. But it leaves out nuanced characteristics (My Bloody Valentine’s churning sensuality, 4AD band Cocteau Twins’ fluid faerie tales and more). In the last few years, a growing number of legacy shoegaze acts have gotten those nuances re-evaluated in the finer light of reunions, tours, re-releases and/or comeback records (mbv in 2013 and Slowdive’s live dates last year, just naming a few).
It’s gone all out this year, too: Swervedriver’s first new record in 17 years, Lush’s forthcoming reissues (with a live reunion scheduled for 2016) and the Jesus and Mary Chain’s world tour behind the Psychocandy anniversary. But most of 2015 has belonged to Ride. The Oxford-born shoegaze foursome has been booked solid with dates worldwide since February, culminating with dates in Asia and in its landmark 1990 debut Nowhere getting a grand reissue next month, marking its 25th anniversary. But it’s the stateside dates—punctuated by festival sets at Coachella in April and next month’s Fun Fun Fun Fest—that have meant the most to the band.
"I always felt—in the last 20 years, it has passed in a flash—that no one gave a shit about Ride," quips Andy Bell, who founded the band with Mark Gardener in 1988. "I definitely credit America and American fans... for giving the music its own life. This reunion, I think, has been powered by the love from America."
Bell paralleled it to how fans in England discovered '70s German Krautrock in the '90s, referencing UK critic Julian Cope and his 1995 book Krautrocksampler.
"Sometimes it takes a different country to appreciate what another country's done," he said. "Which is kind of a sweet thought, really."
Los Angeles producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Beck, Nine Inch Nails) played bass in the latter days of Medicine, America’s first sweet thought and major entry of shoegaze in 1990, when Nowhere was released.
"Anytime I'd read any kind of retrospective piece in the British press about that [shoegaze] era, it was always something quite dismissive about it," Meldal-Johnsen said. Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers didn’t bother waiting. "We will always hate Slowdive more than we hate Adolf Hitler," Edwards said infamously to NME in 1991. Ian Gittins’ oral history of shoegaze cited NME’s satirization of shoegaze.
"I’ve spent so much time in the UK and U.S. in the past 25 years and I see that," Meldal-Johnsen said. "And it’s a bummer… Ride, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Lush, they all seem to get more respect in the States for their merits rather than being trendy. It’s a matter of perspective."
The western shift of culture, time, and place to a new generation has enhanced the genre. It’s resonated beyond just a transatlantic exchange as well, with shoegaze’s influence writ large in Japan and around the world. Sonic Cathedral Records’ Nathaniel Cramp cites the soundtrack of the Tokyo-set Lost in Translation as introducing a new generation worldwide to Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine, and "Just Like Honey", intermingling on the OST with dreamy Japanese folk-rock band Happy End. Shoegaze’s most recent example of globetrotting is Indonesian label Gerpfast Kolektif’s and Welsh/Canadian label Raphalite Records’ release of Revolution - The Shoegaze Revival, a compilation of shoegaze acts from 30 bands in 16 countries released this year.
Like sound dissipating over a large space, shoegaze has changed as it has traveled over the last 25 years. Like every genre, it’s been defined more and more by evolving technologies. Even more so, given shoegaze’s progressive exploration, even reliance, on live and studio effects. Now the digital and analog are paired consciously—or treated altogether agnostically—as almost de rigueur live or in studio, with one mimicking or transforming the other. And Ride’s Bell, among the old guard, is adapting. He recalled that all the band’s early material was recorded analog to two-inch tape, with Nowhere written and recorded over just eight months. Now he’s on Twitter and Instagram, recording practice sessions for the band’s new material digitally.
"Last night in Liverpool was the first time or maybe the second we’ve managed to have a little jam that could be something new," Bell said from tour. "And of course I had my phone ready to record it. So there’s two minutes of new Ride music on my phone."
"People say digital is just flat and one dimensional but listen to Run the Jewels 2 and tell me that," Curtis said, praising El-P’s production going back to Cannibal Ox’s 2001 landmark record The Cold Vein. "When the digital is so fucked-up sounding and processed in such a cool way, it kind of decides the question of analog vs. digital."
Over the past 25 years, this natural cross-pollination has coalesced into a paradigm shift for the shoegaze subgenre. Call it Nu gaze, if you prefer the pun. Or differentiate between first and second waves. It’s not like "shoegaze" isn’t a contemptuous and outdated term—as Meldal-Johnsen pointed out—not to mention a misnomer propagated by the UK music press from the get go.
"Apart from being quite shy and quite awkward, we just had these pedalboards so we would spend a lot of our time [on stage] looking down because you’re kind of tap dancing your way through the set a little bit," Neil Halstead of Slowdive said in the Pitchfork Classic documentary on Souvlaki. "That label then stuck. I prefer to think of it as progressive guitar music."
Or, in the case of newer acts like Pat Grossi’s Active Child, progressive harp music. Grossi uses his harp less as a lead and more to adorn his music with texture and high-frequency treble similar to Cocteau Twins. He’s one variation in the diverse spectrum of bands labeled "Nu gaze", shoegaze-adjacent in sound and approach, from synth leads (M83) to guitar heroics (Deerhunter) and beyond in their new creative steps forward. It's shoegaze for the digital, laptop, and home studio age. What '90s studio rats like Shields and Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie did for '60s and '70s-derived guitar-centric analog, a new generation is augmenting with '80s and '90s-derived synth-centric digital, wielding the two without what Meldal-Johnsen called "preciousness," calling shoegaze’s first wave "quaint," even "conservative" in comparison to its second.
"The latest iteration is way more electronic-based," he said. "Back in the day, I think all of these bands felt like rock bands. There was a great amount of pride that the guitar was a weapon to create anything in the [sonic] spectrum… And now it’s not really the point. Now it’s like, ‘We’re just making music and we’re going to use whatever tools we need to.’ It’s not inherently guitar music like it was. It’s just music."
Twenty-five years after Nowhere, The Scene That Celebrates Itself has become the scene that celebrates more, beyond Alan McGee’s simple equation of punk rock plus psychedelia or the digital-analog dichotomy; one that the whole world celebrates. Genres of music take steps forward in their own time, even—perhaps especially—if it’s staring at its own shoes.