Shoegaze is an interesting genre. By definition it is exactly
like regular music, except awkward. If you have no experience with the genre,
it comes from the fact that its founders My Bloody Valentine didn’t move much
on stage leaving the audience to just stare at their shoes. Now is the fact
that a band came along and didn’t have any stage presences enough to constitute
naming a genre of music after them? No of course not, not unless that band is
as good as My Bloody Valentine. So instead of just calling bands that don’t have
any stage presence shoegaze the genre has widely become bands that imitate My
Bloody Valentine. Of course the definitive My Bloody Valentine is their
unbelievable Loveless, which is absolutely brilliant. The dreaminess of the
songs, to the airy lyrics which are hard to understand to the blurry photograph
on the cover (seriously check out some other shoegaze album covers, most of
them are blurry photos like the cover of Loveless or have saturated lighting
like My Bloody Valentine’s first album Isn’t Anything), the whole album just
comes across as brilliant. And while there are a lot of really superb songs on
Loveless the one that absolutely stands out is its opener Only Shallow.
Seriously imagine that its 1991 and three years ago My Bloody Valentine
released the excellent Isn’t Anything and shoegaze has just become a big deal.
Now imagine hearing the first note of Only Shallow and just being blown away by
a band that created a genre and then three years later returned to make its
definitive best album. Enjoy. Dont be dettered by the semi crappy video, it was the ninties
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