ILM's Best Shoegaze / Dream Pop / Post-rock TRACKS poll - RESULTS THREAD

also don't get the apparent love for 'gravity grave', it's not even the best track on that single. 'endless life' is miles better.

40. SWERVEDRIVER "Son of Mustang Ford" (1990) - YES! one of my more favorite songs ever, it was my number 14.

33. THIS MORTAL COIL "Song to the Siren" (1983) - this was the last song i cut from my list, didn't think it really belonged so i cut it.

31. PALE SAINTS "Sight of You" (1988) - i thought i would be the only one to vote for this, love ILM.

29. LUSH "De-Luxe" (1990) - my only Lush song made it.

28. ADORABLE "Sunshine Smile" (1992) - voted for this and have no shame, didn't think it had a chance in hell.

27. SWERVEDRIVER "Rave Down" (1991) - this was going to be my second Swervedriver song but they only got one in from me.

23. THE TELESCOPES "You Set My Soul" (1992) - i mentioned earlier on this thread that i voted for this song, as i never thought it would show up later.

21. CHAPTERHOUSE "Pearl" (1990) - this was my number two, could not give it any more points and barely made the Top 21. thought this was a lock to Top 10, maybe even Top 5.

Only ever heard their early stuff (7# Disaster etc) so I always lumped the Telescopes in with the likes Loop and Spacemen 3 and maybe Thee Hypnotics. Kind of fucked-up Stoogey bad vibes music. Ought to get around to hearing the later stuff.

― Harrison Buttwhistle (NickB), Friday, October 29, 2010 6:47 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

Telescopes were kind of all over the map. I mean, their later albums are almost entirely electronic & instrumental, right? Still, I think every band on Creation the early 90s was contractually obligated to produce at least one or two EPs worth of some combination of MBV and/or The House of Love .

But then, almost all of the bands on the initial shoegaze roster were scene-jumpers or just stylistically unsure, even the heavy hitters. Lush & Ride went full Britpop. So did the Boo Radleys, although in a much classier & more interesting way. Catherine Wheel cast their lot w/ the Bush path to grunge success in America. Slowdive became Mazzy Star. Blur became Blur. Chapterhouse became Techno-Zeppelin. Moose secretly put out some of the best easy-listening records of the decade. The Sarah & Cheree bands who released a shoegaze record or two in 91/92 went back to being Sarah & Cheree bands. Some dabbled in IDM. And a lot of them just imploded or disappeared. By 1995, the few bands who retained any aspect of that sound (Swervedriver, for example) were ridiculed or ignored by the weeklies.

What fascinates me about the UK music press of that time is how adept they were at playing kingmaker & manipulating trends. I mean, they basically systematically dismantled the baggy scene with similar efficiency, right? (or maybe baggy did it to itself - I don't remember). It seems like that sound was pretty healthy in 1991, and then nowhere to be found by 92.

Nothing wrong w/ being itinerant, but I wish that some of the core UK shoegaze bands had stuck to their guns & pushed the sound further, esp. since some of the last major records of the era (Split, Giant Steps*, Mezcal Head, Pygmalion) to bear the hallmarks of shoegaze showed it being refined and expanded in promising ways.

*included this b/c even though it was a critical smash, its success had very little to do with the Meriel Barham cameo.

Of course in late 90s, the same NME/MM set who had ignored or written off Bark Psychosis, Disco Inferno & Flying Saucer Attack five years earlier were pissing themselves over bands like Mogwai, GYBE, Death in Vegas & Sigur Ros...

I think during the nomination phase not many people suggested post-rock because there was already much more shoegaze and dream pop coming in?

OR BECAUSE THEY WERE POSEURS.

Or because the few post-rock bands that seemed to stylistically fit the feel of the poll belonged on it not because they were post-rock but because they were DRONEROCK which was somehow missed off the poll concept entirely?

The complete lack of Medicine on the results so far makes me ;_;

But ditto Seefeel. But instead we've got all this Sundays and Blur gubbins. Which fair enough, I love those bands, but WTF at them placing on a shoegaze poll and Medicine and Seefeel not making it.

Moan moan, old person complaining young persons don't understand that thing that was big and important when they was young.

my top 4 votes were all dream pop - I think I just like that kind of stuff (and psychedelic pop) a lot more than shoegaze

The complete lack of Medicine on the results so far makes me ;_; - I'm lukewarm on most Medicine tracks, but "One More" is a colossal fucking jam. I'm still holding out for it, but not getting my hopes up. It deserves to be up there w/ the best of the best tho imo.

But ditto Seefeel. - Is it possible that "Plainsong" could still place? I seriously doubt it at this point.

Blur gubbins. - the one Blur track so far to make the cut is perfectly appropriate for this poll. It's not like Dan Abnormal placed or something.

Perhaps I am just kicking myself for not ordering my list so that all my votes just got 20 points while I'm noticing things that snuck in on not very many votes but a whole lot of points.

But I guess the Medicine vote was split because I went for Aruca.

tbh you could just choose to give everything 40 points because you had 800 points to distribute between 20 tracks. idk why the default for unordered lists was to give everything 20 instead of 40.

Eh? It was 40 tracks, 20 points.

I don't suppose there's much of a chance of any more Kitchens of Distinction appearing, is there?

One KOD track for this poll is a fuckin disgrace.

I imagine the main problem w/ this ^ is that there's not really a consensus pick for Death of Cool.

super vague and far too broad poll disappoints some zzz....

Surely 'mad as snow' will place???

Ey, no disappointment here - concept was pitched just right imo and moka's done a fine job. Genuinely intrigued and excited to see the top twenty now - the last few polls I've participated in have spiralled away at this point into stuff I've never even heard of or the fetishes of the few - will be gutted if this happens here.

DRONEROCK which was somehow missed off the poll concept entirely?

needs its own poll

not that its inclusion among the shoegazing in this poll was a mistake, I just think a straight-up space-rock poll would be nice.

dronerock/pop punk/cumbia noms thread 2011

o whoops u right k8

Yeah at some point I'll do a dronerock / spacerock / radiophonic poll. But that would open a whole bother can of worms because I want to include the post-kraut synth based children of Stereolab type radiophonics but don't really think that IDM radiophonics belongs. And definitely want to allow neo-psych with a strong drone element but don't want to do just a straight garage-psych. Now I am underdtanding Moka's difficulties & filled with fresh appreciation for her task!

Ha ha I guess my rule would be "Would they play this at Sonic Cathedral?" but I think not even all the actual members of The Night That Celebrates itself would agree because they'll at Voice of Seven Thunders but I got in trouble for playing actual Turkish psych like Erkin Koray or something ha ha ha.

Gah, I feel like I'm being the Shoegaze Nazi on this thread which is a bit ridiculous given that it's only a third of the poll's focus.

But it's just kinda odd the proprietary feeling I have towards this genre, even, still, 20 years later, and after even the revival's bandwagon has been chopped up for firewood.

I guess it was because it was the first Genre that I actually saw happen, and unfold in front of my eyes (both reading through the press coverage and catching the bands on their inevitable first press junket to NYC) and it actually formed a great deal of my understandings of how genres *work*, how they form, how they coalesce, how they reach critical mass and the inevitable bandwagon-jumping and mutating into something else. How they start as a geographically centred Scene, how they proliferate, through a specific *sound*, but also through a technology. (I am convinced that one of the main reasons shoegaze happened when it *did* was due to the proliferation of cheap digital effects pedals. If there was one piece of kit which pretty much defined shoegaze, it would be an affordable digital delay pedal which used sampling technology to generate that smeary, washed-out sense of haze which is so typical of the "shoegaze" sound.)

And so it gave me the idea of How Genres Work - that in any genre, there will be several waves.

1) The Originators. This is an artist or a couple of artists who, while stumbling around, often in the process of leaving another genre, hit on something original and new. In shoegaze, this was bands like Spacemen 3, Loop, Telescopes, and then finally it all came together in My Bloody Valentine, ideas that had been floating around within a scene suddenly crystalised into the New Thing.

2) The First Wave. These are the people canny enough to realise "hey, this is a *Thing*, let's do it!" Because the first wave are often the first thing that people see of a genre, they will sometimes get the credit which probably actually belongs to the Originators. This is people like Ride, Lush, Pale Saints, who got in early enough that the genre was still coalescing, so the things they bring lay down the DNA of the genre. (Hence the 4AD dreampop sneaking in through Lush and the 60s Beatle-isms sneaking in through Ride, even though these things were not present in the Originators.)

3) The Proliferators. This starts with people who were just a bit too slow or geographically remote for the First Wave. (Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Boo Radleys) It also includes people who were doing something disconnected, but similar enough stylistically to end up being caught up in the net (Curve, Cranes got in this way) And then of course your inevitable bandwagon jumpers (I could name names but it would be so dull.)

4) The Mutators. Once a genre has been established it splits again. First there is a group of people moving away from the centre, taking shoegaze like sounds as a base, but trying to get *out* (Verve, Mogwai). Then there is a group of people who come from elsewhere, trying to move *in* (the American take on shoegaze, as you got people like Medicine, Lilys, Bowery Electric, Dandy Warhols all doing their own take on it.)

5) The Diaspora. People who discover the sound several years too late to be part of the main core of the genre, but who pick it up and do it again when it's no longer even fashionable. Not in enough of volume to be a revival, but nevertheless, ticking over and keeping people who got attached to the genre happy. They're often geographically removed from the original centre, so you get strange pockets of shoegaze bands in various local scenes in the States or Norway.

This whole thing is why I get so interested in what is/what isn't part of shoegaze, and if it is, which wave it fits into. Because it really was the first time that I learned there was even such a thing as waves. Rather than what happened with other genres that I discovered like wandering into a room after the party was over and trying to figure out how it all happened and how everything fit together.

there probably should of been a strictly post-rock poll

Ah but that would have been another argument.

Good post, Wheal Dream.

I actually have no idea what 'dream pop' or 'post-rock' mean. I don't recall either of those terms being used (in the British music press) at the time, apart from one review of (I think) a Ride gig in the USA which said that they called this style of music 'dream pop' over there. When I saw the poll title I just assumed it was three alternative names for shoegazing.

I kind of associate "dream pop" with something earlier, and also broader - that it was that kind of post-Goth and blissed out heavily reverbed stuff that 4AD specialised in the mid to late 80s (and even early 90s) - Cocteau Twins sounding stuff that wasn't overtly goth. But also taking in Chameleons and Talk Talk. And it being earlier than shoegaze, like, an 80s thing, after post-punk. But it was just something that the American indie press used to described a certain kind of dreamy sounding British music - so when the first Shoegaze bands started coming over to the States, the US alternapress went "Ah. Yes. Dreampop."

Yeah "dream pop" is hella ambiguous!

Post-rock was a term coined by Simon Reynolds in a Bark Psychosis review in Melody Maker and referred to rock instruments being used to generate non-rock sounds and textures. It subsequently got applied to bands with a similar approach - Disco Inferno, Butterfly Child, Papa Sprain, Seefeel, Moonshake, Laika, Main etc. He definitely wrote a follow up feature on this scene in The Wire and traced the roots of these bands back to Can, Talk Talk, In A Silent Way-era Miles, JAMC, the Cocteaus, AR Kane etc. I'm kind of fuzzy how the jump got made to US post-rock, but stuff like Tortoise, Ui, Labradford were the first wave of those bands that it was applied to. And yeah, they did seem more akin to that UK crowd than whatever else was around (lo-fi?).

Sorry if I'm writing weird mechanical sentences, but I'm kind of fucked from too much fresh air right now.

NickB, that xp is hella mechanical!

Ok *that* construction / derivation of Post-Rock, which I had completely forgotten, makes a *lot* more sense in the context of this poll. Because I had got so used to thinking of post-rock being GYBE & Rachels & Tortoise & June of 44 & a bunch of boring Chicago school bands and maths rock and Kranky Records which really didn't fit in with the other stuff. While Bark Psychosis -> Disco Inferno -> Seefeel -> Laika totally does. My mistake.

Yeah, I don't know how it came to mean Explosions In The Sky who are as rock as anything but there you go.

Nice shoegaze summary btw!

Though the term post-rock was coined to describe the music of BP, BP weren't necessarily considered part of the first wave of post-rock: the genre. Though if Mogwai was lumped in, I suppose BP could be as well.. As I recall, no one really know what scene/genre/movement to associate those bands with. Even tho the bands were definitely onto their own thing, the records sounded nice enough next to shoegaze & space-rock. But no one was going around referring to Moonshake as post-rock or anything. Or Bark Psychosis for that matter.

These days, they call it The Lost Generation

The Lost Generation

Here it comes.

wow, what a nice surprise! I expected you would be finishing up on Monday.

Or Bark Psychosis for that matter. - except for Simon Reynolds, obv.

Well I could give you the top 10 on Monday if you'd rather ;)

Mmm? ILM isn't letting me post html tags?

That's strange keeps giving me the 'an error has ocurred. Please try again later.' and I already checked and the format is correct.

http://www.gloriousnoise.com/images/stoneroses_album_300x300.jpg
20. Stone Roses - I Wanna be Adored (6 votes, 212 points)
Stone Roses (1989)
Youtube

Ok I see what the problem was. The image had the $ symbol and it seems ILX doesn't like it.

You know, when I first saw this track on the noms list, I didn't think it should have been included. But then I listened again & yeah, this track is gaze as hell. Actually, there was a pretty big overlap b/e the shoegazers and the baggy scene, or at least there were a lot of gaze tracks with house beats.

Hm, I dunno. I see how it fits musically, but it does make me worry that the top 20 is going to be Stone Roses and Boos and all the purer but less well known stuff will have been edged out.

(Was intending to be out tonight but am so knackered that I think I will stay in and watch this countdown instead.)

Do you consider Lazarus to be "pure" boos? It's pretty noisy, actually.

xp iirc it was the only Roses song nominated, so I think you can breath easy.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/49/Just_Like_Honey_%28Single%29.jpg
19. Jesus and Mary Chain - Just Like Honey (9 votes, 213 points)
Just Like Honey (1985)
Youtube

Sorry for the delay I was taking a bath :P

I knew connecting the Boos to the Roses in that way would be contentious, actually, and I did vote for one of their songs, but... I guess I'm wary of the name-recognition overpowering the poll. But I suppose these polls are always going to be lists of what ilx0rs know and like about the genre rather than some sort of objective list of what is representative of 'shoegazing'.

xposts

OK these two in a row is just making me sputter at the anachronism! Like, two singles which were, arguably, responsible for two completely different genres of music (baggy & dronepop) just ending up in the top 20 of a *shoegaze* poll?

Just... No. Get one history textbook. :(