No Filler Music Podcast - The Obscure Shoegaze Episode

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

A couple weeks ago we pondered the question: what happens when you combine doom metal with shoegaze? Doomgaze is an actual thing, with a history dating back to the 90s and a rise in the mid 2010s. But we'll get into all that next week: on this episode we bask in the shimmering, deafening, lush haze of our favorite subgenre: shoegaze. We pick a few random branches on the shoegaze tree and admire all that makes grunge's less popular sibling so goddamn amazing. Tracklist: Oeil - Strawberry Cream Letting Up Despite Great Faults - The Colors Aren't You Or Me The December Sound - Never The December Sound - Painkiller Whirr - Blue Nothing - Bent Nail This show is part of the Pantheon Podcast network. Pantheon is a proud partner of AKG by Harman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Winners, find fabulous for less. And welcome to No Filler. The music podcast dedicated to sharing the often overlooked hidden gyms that fill the space between the singles on our favorite records. My name is Quentin With me as always is my brother Travis And it's shoe gaze time, brother Ready to gaze upon thine shoes

I don't really care about shoes I do care about shoegays though You're not a shoe guy I know you're all about the watches dude I was but I got to tell you the The pandemic I stopped wearing a watch because I didn't need to And now I'm like

Do I really need to wear a watch ever? Thank you Which I know you've been saying that for years, Q. You know, so I think I'm going to narrow down my watch collection to like one or two, you know. Well, yeah. And I'm not a shoe guy, you know. Some people are gazing at their shoes all the time thinking, when am I going to, when can I buy another pair? You know what I mean?

Yeah. We're really starting this off with some really bad pawns here. I'm sorry. But we're talking about shoe gaze today. Yeah, we're talking about, I think, a genre that we have determined. is a shared favorite of ours. Like maybe my all-time favorite subgenre of rock, I think it could be Shugay's.

I think it's safe to say that. Yeah, it's up there at the top for me, dude. Because when you, I think when you, and we'll get into all of this, I think, but, and we probably talked about this on our My Bloody Valentine episode, Shugay is like, we almost exclusively listened to Shugays and maybe didn't realize it, you know, with the Dream Pop era, of the 2010s, right? Here's, here are the two main revelations that we've had since starting this podcast, dude.

We listened to almost exclusively emo in high school. Yeah. And then right out of high school into college and, you know, beyond, we were listening to shoegaze for the most part. Yeah, and what the revelation about emo was that our definition of emo was very narrow. You know what I mean? Yeah. Because it turns out emo covers a pretty wide spectrum of the kind of music that we listened to in high school.

And same goes for shoegaze. When we, you know, shoe gaze and dream pop, they're synonymous with each other. It's the same thing. Right. Two sides of the same corn. Another thing that I'm realizing more and more, you know, with diving into shoegays more and more each year, how many times did I just say more and more? You just keep seeing it more and more. There's a lot of similarities in like chord progression or maybe melodies with shoegaze in

grunge and they came about around the same time. Like shoe gaze hit in the 90s when grunge hit and then obviously grunge took off. But as we've talked about like shoegays never stopped. Right. So we dove into this and had some deep convos on shoegays during our my bloody Valentine episode. So if you want to go back and really dive into it, check out our episode on their album from 91, Loveless. So they are considered like the godfathers of the genre. They're, you know, the Grandadies. Kevin Shields, yeah, Kevin Shields, the main guy behind that wall of sound

that's synonymous with shoegays. He kind of developed this guitar styling that basically like jumpstarted the whole genre. It's a technique called glide guitar. So I'm going to play a clip. This is from this BBC interview called The Joy of the Guitar Riff. Just for people that aren't familiar with shoegays, I think we may have actually played this clip

on our My Bloody Valentine episode. But just to kick things off here, here is so the interview starts with Butch Vig, who is a super famous, producer. He produced a Siamese Dream by Smashy Pumpkins. He's done Sonic Youth. He's done, he did Nevermind. Starts with him and then it jumps over to Kevin Shields and they're kind of talking about that distinct style of guitar that he created. I think those early my bloody Valentine records are groundbreaking sonically. Just with adding these little bends and things with his

his wangy bar, it just causes these beautiful swells. Instead of just going to and you know, I got it not really creates all these juxtapositions of tone. Juxtapositions of tone. It's like that wavery, kind of uneasy feeling that you get when you hear, when you listen to Shugaze, you know? Yeah, it kind of feels like, you know, like a tilt a whirl or something like that, you know? Yeah, I love it, dude. Or you're looking at a fun house mirror, you know, if a fun house mirror made, like, you know, played a guitar, that's what it would sound like. Yeah, and then it's doing that.

And then another thing they did a lot on Loveless especially was they just kind of built up all these layers of feedback. And it just kind of played throughout the entire album just like in the very background of the song. You know, you might say that it created a wall of sound. It did. That's exactly what it did. Yeah. So a couple episodes ago, we decided it might be fun to do an episode on Doom Metal, ShoeGate, and then doom gaze, which is kind of a mix of the two genres.

Last week, we covered Sleep, which is, I guess, one of the pioneers of Doom Metal, right, Tram? Yeah, so I mean, not really. So here's the thing, like, you know, a lot of Doom metal enthusiasts would probably say, Sleep is not a Doom band. And they're right to point that out. They're more of a stoner rock band, but they incorporated elements of Doom Metal. into their sound and a lot of people credit sleep as sort of revitalizing that like bluesy metal, slower metal sound that Sabbath invented basically, which, you know, went on to to sort of do that

resurgence of doom metal that we've seen in the last decade. So yeah, sleep is not a doom metal band exclusively. They're more of like a stoner metal band, but they incorporate elements of doom. And I just wanted to play Holy Mountain. So that's what we did. But that's last week. Yeah. So now we're doing Shugays. And from what I understand, Kew, and this is exactly what I'm going to do next week for

our Doomgays episode. But we're going to listen to a few different artists, right? Yeah. So last week I had said we were going to focus on one band, Japanese Shuge's group called Oil. I'm going to go with oil, dude. I don't know how to pronounce it. But we're still going to play a track from them, but I thought it would be fun to, so I've referenced this shoe gaze roadmap before, this really cool infographic that I found that kind of points you in different directions based on what kind of shoe gaze you want to listen to. And I thought it would be fun to kind of follow the arrows up from my bloody Valentine and get into the more heavy, more distorted kind of stuff.

and hopefully that will transition us nicely into DoomGaze next week. So I like that. I'm stoked, dude. I found some great artists on here. And I didn't go any farther than the album that is on this map. So whoever put this together, there's no username on it or anything. I can't really find much about it. I even tried to do like a reverse image search.

I can't really find much about this. So let's just say that the shoot. Shugay's gods just made this for us. Okay. So we're going to start with oil. So they are pretty damn close to my bloody Valentine's Lovelace on this map. So I wanted to start with them just to give you that classic Shugee sound. They have an EP that came out in 2007 called Urban Twilight.

Really great. There's really not that much about most of these. artists on this roadmap are pretty obscure, which is cool. So I don't have that much to go off of these guys, but they were formed back in 06, and this is their first EP that they release. So I'm going to play the first track on this album again is called Urban Twilight. This song is called Strawberry Cream. Yeah, man. So it sounds like, it sounds a lot like my bloody Valentine so I can see how this is like one step in this map, right? Like we're one.

Yeah, it's like one exit away. Obviously, my bloody Valentine were huge influences on these guys. And that's probably going to be the case for a lot of the bands we're playing today, right? My bloody Valentine is to shoe gaze as Black Sabbath is to fucking metal and do metal. I gotcha. You know? It's the origin of that sound because he invented that guitar sound, right? Yeah, and these bands all are paying tribute to the gods.

Yeah, yeah. So, man, I just love this sound, you know, I just can't get enough of it. I don't, I don't even care how similar it sounds. Right. No, yeah. You know? But just the way, like, it just envelopes you, you know what I mean? Yeah, it kind of puts you in a trance.

Yeah. What I love about it, and I feel like this is pretty, not unique to the genre, but this is one, I think, outstanding characteristic of it. It repeats itself a lot. It's very repetitive and it loops a lot. It always kind of, it quickly goes back to that, to the, to the bass melody, you know?

Yeah. Like, it doesn't take long for it to go back to, to where it started. So it just kind of, I think that's kind of what puts you in that, in that trance, you know? Those drums were straight up loveless. I got to. give that drummer proper credit.

Remember what we learned, which was really cool? We learned that during the recording of Loveless, that My Bloody Valentine record, their drummer got really, really sick, and he wasn't able to sit in during these recording sessions. So Kevin Shields brought in recordings of him playing drums and spliced up each Tom hit, each snare hit, each bass drum hit, and pieced together his drum beats for him so that it would still be his live drums on the record, even though he wasn't able to be there. I thought that was really cool. And it's such a great drum sound.

It's very simple. It almost sounds like it's just an electronic, like a drum machine. Yeah. I feel like that's carried on with shoegaze over the years. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. So you said there's the Japanese band, right? Yeah.

Are they singing in Japanese? I couldn't really pick up on the... Oh, I don't know, dude. On the words. That's how it goes with Shugays, right? It's all just kind of mesh together in that wall. Yeah, right. So yeah, we're going to move right along.

So before we start heading into the direction of the heavy stuff, I just wanted to take this opportunity to play one of my favorite dream pop albums, and I know they're one and the same, but, you know, Dream Pop, I think, is a little more upbeat sounding and more poppy, I guess. So I don't think I've brought this band up at all in the run of this podcast. I know you're a fan of these guys, Trave. Letting Up Despite Great Faults. I haven't thought about them in a long time. Dude. So I just revisited their self-titled album from 2009 just when I was listening

to all these shoegaze bands and yeah man it holds up so these guys near and dear to my heart this is one of the bands that we discovered during our music blog days when we were running New Dust

and I don't know which member I think it was the singer I actually got to interview him through the blog I don't remember any of the questions that I asked him Did you ask him, hey, would you consider yourself more of a shoegaze or a dream pop pan? I honestly probably did.

And I know I brought up my bloody Valentine as well. But I mean, as we've said, like there are differences between the two. They're just, they're under the same umbrella, if that makes sense. And that's why I wanted to play this before we start to dive into the heavy stuff. It's just an excuse to play a song from this album, dude. So this is just a couple years after that oil album came out. So again, this is a self-titled by a band called Letting Up Despite Great Faults. This song is called The Colors Aren't You or Me.

Love that song. Yeah, that's great. So, like, what makes this under the Dream Papa Shugay's umbrella? So for me, it's the... The vocals, maybe? The vocals and the guitar tone. Yeah. The fuzziness and the sound of that guitar on the background that's kind of ever present and stuff like that.

that is what puts it in shoegays is maybe maybe as a subgenre of this group yeah and that's the thing like we you know we should say that just like with with any band

you know rarely is a band exclusively one thing you know what I mean but yeah I would agree I was going to say the same thing it's that

that you got kittens in there again yeah just run around yeah it would be the the sound of that guitar and his vocals, because the vocals, you know, the breathy kind of dreamy vocals is definitely a shoegade signature, you know. Yeah.

And I feel like, you know, we could just go around in circles here, but I feel like what makes it dream pop over just classic shoegays, it seems like they kind of, they dial down the fuzziness a little bit and they, he removes his vocals a little bit from that wall sound so that it's all just it's not all just like washed away in that in that uh feedback and distortion yeah uh and it's you know it's a more upbeat sound i think his vocals are definitely um i don't know the the name of the vocalist on my bloody valentine but um Kevin shields and Belinda butcher are the vocals for my bloody valentine yeah yeah he's definitely uh pulling from from that's that sound style of singing.

And that's classic shoegaze. Yes. Yeah. His vocals are, or just sound very, very similar to my

ability of Valentine for sure. But everything about that song. And that's, that's even, that's what, 2010? 2011?

2009. 2009. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. All right,

dude. Let's get heavy. So, um, I'm ready. So I'm going to go, we're going to follow, follow the arrows up.

We're going to skip over this band called Curve, which it's a female front-end band. They have an album called Doppelganger that shows up on here. It's awesome, but I wanted to skip ahead and get even more heavier. I'm going to link to this roadmap again on our Twitter, because I can't stress enough how many awesome bands I've found through this roadmap. We're going to jump to a band called the December Sound. They're from Boston, Massachusetts. Again, not a lot of information out there on them.

And, dude, this album is a banger. I like bangers. I like all kinds of bangers, too. So this album is called The Silver Album. It came out in 2007. You're not going to find it on Spotify. Now, I think this stuff, the heavier it gets, I feel like the more grungy it gets.

So you might completely disagree with me, but, uh, so again, this is a band called the December sound. This song is called Never. So, um, this starts to kind of flirt with, with DoomGaze. It's not, um, not necessarily heavy or slow enough, but the distortion amount, I would say, and sort of the, the, the, some of the guitar stuff there. I feel like the drums are way more aggressive, you know, like way more just classic rock. So I'm curious if this map that you're working off of, if doom gauges on it. I don't think so, dude.

The next band that I'm going to play is definitely still in the shoe, you guys pocket. These guys, I just couldn't ignore, dude. I had to play some of this stuff. Well, just let me ask you this. Is there a band on there called Jessu? Oh, dude, it would take me forever to look. Okay.

But no, so if I kept following this, even farther into even more like darker, heavier stuff. It just gets into this really weird, noisy stuff. Yeah. It doesn't get any doom metal. Like it doesn't go metal. It just goes more and more noise. Okay.

Let's take a quick break. So the cool thing about this album by the December sound, they definitely have a distinct sound, but it's not all just shoegaze. You know, it's not all shoe gaze. It's not all one sound. I picked a couple songs to play from this that are, I feel more shoe gazing, but they flirt with psychedelic rock a lot on here. It's a great album, man.

All the way through every song is killer. I highly recommend it. So again, I'm going to play one more song from this album. This is, again, the December sounds, The Silver album. I'm going to jump down to track five. This song is called Pain Killer. That's great, man. Good shit.

I love that little keyboard ditty that's going on throughout the whole thing. That's great. Yeah. So, like, I would put this on the more, like, psychedelic side of shoegaze for sure. And that's what's so great about shoegaze. It's just so versatile. Yeah, I think that's what's so great about it. Yeah.

You can add those basic shoe gaze building blocks to any genre. Yeah. You know, and, yeah, this, man, I don't remember who it was, but you brought an artist to what you heard. once that I fell in love with and I think it was like psychedelic shoegays basically was what it was which could be any number of different bands because I feel like

we've done some shoegays and some psychedelic quite a bit so it was a female vocalist I remember that and it was great it was like an EP Oh I know what you're talking about too I know what you're talking about

Yeah it was something I heard on K-EXP It was yeah yeah I was And I brought it up again Once an episode I bring up K-E-X-B. Yeah, I mean, we know that you listen to Empire. We know. All right, man.

So the last pick is we're going to just follow this arrow up one more. Get a little heavier. This is a group that goes by W-H-I-R. I don't know about them. Really? Yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah, so they are hilarious, man.

this bio on Spotify says the Bay Area Sex Tett channeled the dreamy spirit of Shugay's Giants of the 90s like My Bloody Valentine, slow dive, and ride. Take a peek at the very center of this freaking roadmap and those are the three artists. Yeah.

Yeah. That's where it all started. Yeah, so I just found out about this band through this roadmap. So have you heard of their stuff? Are you into them? I think I've listened to a few of their their songs, yeah. Cool.

So again, I didn't dive any deeper than whatever album was on this roadmap. So this is an album of theirs called Distressor from 2012. I'm going to play a couple songs from it. The first one I'm going to play is called Blue. Great drum change there. That's a classic move, man. Yeah, I like that stuff. Yeah.

I like it. So that's a little more grungy almost. Yeah, a little bit, maybe the tone of the guitar. You know, that's about it really. But yeah, I mean, that's the thing. Like, when did this come out? 2012. 2012, okay.

I think the reason that the guitar tone can sometimes, like, flirt with grunge guitar tone is because the origin of this is the same time that grunge hit, you know. You're talking about shoegaze. Yeah, I'm saying, like, I think the reason sometimes that shoe gaze might sound grungy is because both really kind of started at the same time. Yeah. So like if you're going to be a shoe gaze band and you were influenced by those early shoegaze bands

in the 90s, there's a lot of crossover like we were saying with grunge. Yeah. And chances are you're probably into grunge team. Yeah. Without a doubt. So with the music that we've heard so far, Trave and you've been diving into Doom gaze, are you still feeling, are you hearing differences still? Or are these starting to get more and more?

Okay, cool. Yeah, no, I'm saying, are you asking if DoomGaze is a whole different ballgame? You were wondering if these were going to get more and more closer to DoomGaze, the heavier we got on this roadmap. Yeah, I mean, no, because the thing about DoomGaze is that it incorporates the themes lyrically sometimes of Doom Metal and also like the slowness of it. That classic guitar sound that you showed me last week. week, that classic doom, doom metal sound? Yeah, exactly. So it goes down that route. And it's a little bit more, you know, just like doom, you know, tends to deal with themes of like depression and, and, you know, gloominess and stuff like that. So, you know, thematically, it's more

doom metal-esque. I'm hoping that you take me on some more fantastical journeys next week. Into the stoner sun. there's yeah there will be no crimson dragon darn or magic caravan but um okay yeah we'll go on a journey dude i'll tell you this uh i found some great artists that um i'm now like a huge fan of like you know sweet one of the albums i listened to now on the daily and that's more of the more contemporary doom gaze artists that I found. So kind of like with a lot of these artists, like you know, you can trace it back to, you know,

the 90s and stuff, right? Yeah. So I was going to play another song from Wer, but let's just do something different. Let's listen to a song together for the first time right now. Okay. Let's go even farther. Let's get darker, sadder, intense.

Let's see what happens, Jeff. All right. So I'm going to go, I'm going to jump one arrow from Wer. And we're going to play a song by a band called Nothing. So this is an album called Guilty of Everything. Came out in 2014. Let's do track three. This one's called Bent Nail.

I like it. Yeah, it's kind of more, oh man, I wish I could put my finger on the band that I'm thinking of. But yeah, it definitely has a 90s, 90s post-punk. Yeah. shoe gaze, but still very shoe gazing. Yeah, totally. I can see that. I don't know if I, I guess it's heavier.

It's got a little bit more of a guitar. Yeah, distortion. Distortion's crank. The feedback's kind of, the wall of sound isn't, isn't quite there as much as classic shoe gaze. Yeah, exactly. Right. Well, that's all I got, brother.

Cool. I like it. I dig it. I think this is going to, we're going to connect all these dots cue. We play some doom gaze. Awesome. next week and I think you're going to like it man I think you're going to like it especially since you you're not a traditional heavy metal guy yeah and this is not get me there

however you need to get me there man and I wouldn't say I wouldn't say doom gaze is is metal really at all it's just heavy heavy darker slower shoe gaze well as I've as I've said in the past like I always enjoy metal when you show it to me, but I'm not seeking it out. So maybe this is the missing puzzle piece, dude. Well, like I said, there's a, there's a bajillion subgenres of metal. So there really is something for everybody.

I just don't know if I would put doom gaze into the metal. Well, we'll see. We'll see about this. Do you want to say that like put doom gaze, on the shoe gaze branch. It's not going to be on the metal branch. It's closer to the metal branch than anything that you played today. But yeah, at the end of the day, it's still, well, there's different flavors of it.

So we'll get into it next week. Okay, cool. You know, just like with anything, there's going to be doom gaze bands that are more metal than some other ones. But I don't know, Q. You know, that's the thing about genres, you know. That was the thing. the thing we hated, they became a chore for us when back in our

new dust, music blog days. Trying to describe music, yeah. Every day, doing a write-up on a band and like, well, I might as well just put indie rock band because, like, if I know what this is considered, you know? Right. It feels like you're pulling shit out of your ass when you try to explain the sound of a band

strictly just in genres, you know? Yeah. Well, we don't write for pitchfork. key. We're podcast hosts. It's amateur hour here. If we wrote for Pitchfork, we could just pull from that knowledge bank that they appear to have at the ready, you know. I wonder if they have some kind of like genre book that you get as soon as you get hired.

Like a Pitchfork Bible with they hand you. You go read up on this. You better list at least two obscure references in every article to advance to nobody to hear it up. And you better sharpen that pitchfork because we're brutal here. At least they used to be. They're not so bad anymore. They were for a while, man. Yeah.

Part of me thinks that was intentional on their part in the beginning. In the early 2000s, and it worked. It seemed like every band that we loved, pitchfork hated. Maybe we just listen to shit bands, Q. That's possible, dude. I don't think so. Anyway, so yeah, man, next week. We're going to take the Doom medal,

and we're going to take the shoegaze and we're going to see what happens. We're going to marry them together into one ketchup bottle. Yeah, I think you're going to like what I got in store for us here, Q. I'm excited, man. Awesome. All right, well, you can find us on Twitter at No Fither Podcast. Reach out to us.

Tell us what you like, what you don't like. Tell us what you'd like us to talk about. And we may, you know, we may give you a shot. Tell us what songs you've been listening to. Like, what's been on heavy rotation for you lately? You know, we might play that as an outro on one of our What You Heard episodes or something like that, which is our monthly mixtape episode. So we'll be doing that in a couple of weeks.

Yeah, let us know who your favorite Shugays artist is, you know? If you got a favorite due metal band, let us know who it is. We're always looking for more. Shugays or Dream Pop. If you're like, I don't listen to Shugays, I listen to Dream Pop. I know that there's a distinct difference to me. I'll tell us what your favorite dream pop band is. Yeah.

Because we listened to a ton of dream pop artists in the early 20, 2010s when that, back when those bands were really kind of picking up and sort of a dime a dozen back then, you know. They really were, man. Yeah. But anyway, yeah. So hit us up on Twitter at No Filler Podcast. You can also find us on the Pantheon podcast network. that is the home of all things music related.

Every podcast on that network is music-centric, and there's just about a show for everybody, really. So check out. I think we're over 60 podcasts now, man. That's insane, man. Yeah. Yeah, we just keep growing and grown. Dude, when we check out.

You know what's crazy? I feel like we had like 25 or 30 when we joined. Yeah. And that was only a couple years ago. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, check out. Pantheonpodcast.com. You'll find plenty of other great podcasts to listen to all music related.

And that's that. And as always, thank you to Pantheon sponsor, AKG, for supporting the show. Next week we'll be coming at you with some doom gaze. So until next week, thank you as always for listening. My name is Quentin. My name is Travis. You all take care. It was the night before the gathering and all through the house. The host rapid cozy cashmere Throw from Home Sent. for their spouse, kids' toys for $6.99 under the tree, and crystal glasses for just $14.99 for their brother Lee.

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