The first shoegaze record

Those EP's are so freakin' awesome. I remember being pretty crestfallen when XYZ was released (as did all my friends who liked them, too). But, yeah; they didn't want to be pigeonholed at all - right out of the gate even.

 

Precisely my experience. Actually, it was when the "Little Bird" single came out (which came before "...xyz") that I was disappointed. While I still think "...xyz" is their weakest album, the two that followed ("Honey Bee" and "Live A Little Love A Lot") are masterpieces, in my book.

But yes; those first three EPs are still some of my favorite releases in the 'genre'!

 

I think that Revolving Paint Dream (or maybe even some Biff Bang Pow) had the sound a little bit - early to mid '80's.

 

I don’t feel like Ride was first. They’re more like the exemplar of the musical sub-genre

I think Cocteau Twins or My Bloody Valentine were on the cutting-edge start of Shoegaze, but maybe weren’t quite Shoegaze bands.

 

Agree %100, except that I love "Little Bird...". I have a huge subway poster for that single, and one for "XYZ", too. Wish I had one for "Honey Bee" or "Cool Breeze" though (if they even exist...).

 

"Heroes" - David Bowie?

 

Oh, me, too! When I revisited "Little Bird" and "...xyz" a few years later, I got totally into both of them. Just need some time to accept the changes, I guess.

In 1997, I'd gotten in touch with Russell Yates, and he offered to sell me a few subway posters that he still had lying around. I passed, and always regretted it. Cool that you've got one!
Oooh, yes. One for "Cool Breeze" would be insane, particularly since Arundhati Roy is the woman on the cover!
Lara Lockton's artwoork for everything from "Little Bird" to "Live A Little..." is great, too, though.

 

Or.....Dancing Barefoot - Patti Smith?

 

No problem, I wasn't particularly upset. I do like lots of stuff from the '70s and '80s (and a bit from the '90s and even beyond), and I have a few CDs by Slowdive, Catherine Wheel and others, so I'm not dismissing "shoegaze" ...

 

Winstanley said he was unsure of what shoegazing is. So I just posted an example.

 

It’s definitely THE example! The very best example even!

 

I'll take a shot at it

To me the shoegazer 'sound' is lush, dreamy melodic sheets and layers of sound that extend and sustain for an extended period with minor variations along the way that evokes being in a dream. A good shoegazer track has to have some kind of drone or sustained chords as a foundation with lots of layers added on top of it to create that wall of sound where multiple layers emerge as one amazing sound that blow you away.
I personally call the sound 'dreamscapes'. A great shoegazer song should be dreamy, melodic, trancelike and intense.
IMO the sound and style first emerged on early 70's progressive rock, particularly the Euro prog bands (many of which were influenced by the Velvet Underground) as well as early Vangelis, Hawkwind and others from that period.. One can certainly find seeds of this sound from the 60's such as the aforementioned Beach Boys track (which sounds like a Smile period outtake to me) or drone rock like Canned Heat's 'On The Road Again' or the Kinks 'See My Friends' and many many others but clips people have posted here such as Ride, MX-80, A.R. Kane as well as my personal favorites like My Bloody Valentine, Curve, Lush even Enya are all excellent examples of the sound.

My only regret: the shoegazer genre (like garage punk and pop-psych) didn't last very long. The great genres never do for some reason.

 

If you slightly slowed down "Crimson & Clover" by Tommy James & The Shondells.....


I mean that guitar sound is right out of the shoegaze playbook, no?

 

I'd also say that with Shoegaze the records tend to still sound like a band playing, rather than something like The Cocteau Twins which sounds like it's beamed in from another planet.

 

I mentioned it above, but the coda to Yes’s Starship Trooper, where the song proper disappears and the music turns into an endlessly repeating chord cycle of flanged guitar, ticks all the boxes of your definition of the shoegazing style.

 

It’s a bit more modern sound than Starship Trooper, though, don’t you think? Also, usually a bit less busy, a slight bit more jangly just around the edges, and a lot more droney.

I love Starship Trooper, though, maybe more than the whole Shoegaze genre.

 

Interesting.
Incidentally, I've always thought this song (when played very loudly) sounds/feels like what I'd imagine it would be to be directly under a UFO as it was touching down on earth; bright, swirling lights, otherworldly sounds coming in and out of 'tune'... almost disorienting.
But, this is maybe just an exception that happens to be from, arguably, the archetypal 'shoegaze' record.

 

Sure it’s a more modern sound than Starship Trooper. I don’t know how Steve Howe got the flanged sound on the “shoegaze” section of the track, but it probably wasn’t by stepping on a pedal like Slowdive did. But, like many of the tracks on a pre-shoegaze album such as The Notorious Byrds Brothers, such as Change Is Now, Starship Trooper features a repetitive, droney, heavily processed guitar part that anticipates shoegaze.

 

Maybe not *everything*, but they were certainly a huge influence on J.S. Bach. We'd never had the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor without the Beatles 'Helter Skelter'.

 

Moose were great...I also nominate their previous incarnation "Critical Mass"

Here's a video I made of one of the songs off their only release..



Highly recommended and not too expensive to buy.

Also, how about Loop to some degree?

 

Swervedriver's Adam Franklin cops that part hard on one of his solo tunes, even quoting the lyrics.

 

Aye, well I didn't mean to suggest that the Shoegaze sound isn't ethereal. Indeed, ethereal is pretty much the mission statement with much of it.

 

You could say it started in the 80's with everything mentioned above but I think this proto version from 67' fits nicely.

 

Right. I agree with the 'ethereal' part, just not necessarily that that MBV tune, for example, sounds "like a band playing" (to say nothing of the tune that precedes it on the album). And however from-another-planet-like it sounds in 2019, it was much more foreign in 1991.
Again; I'm granting that maybe it's an exception among what's more typical of 'shoegaze' recordings, but it's noteworthy that it comes from the most heralded and influential shoegaze record of all-time.