recommend me some lost shoegaze classics

http://www.gamerseurope.com/whippingboy/downloads.htm

Oh, there's far worse bands out there. I saw Duster and Hovercraft play an in-store in the mid 90s and they were pleasant enough.

How 'bout Creation era Telescopes....amazing.

Is there a decent book or article out there that gets into how shoegaze came about, where it came from, etc.? Or do I just have to prepare a list of questions for Ned to answer?

HI THERE

Something like Blissed Out gives a sense of some of the rhetorical claims at the time, but only from one person, after all. Even so, Simon Reynolds did help codify a lot of the language used to discuss it so you can't quite escape him on that front.

A larger perspective would have to go into a lot more -- that MBV in 1988 were synthesizing everything from Sonic Youth to Public Enemy to the Beach Boys to etc. etc. gives a sense of it, but at the same time it's not like they were the only band interested in those performers, and they certainly did not set out to go 'oh yeah let's create a genre called shoegaze,' any more than Bauhaus formed by thinking, "So, let's create goth." You'd have to also include other contemporary bands seen as allies or fellow travellers or what have you.

David Cavanagh's My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize talks about Creation more than shoegaze-as-such but there's a huge overlap by default. Mike McGonigal's 33 1/3 entry on Loveless goes into MBV's history. Again, too limited by half in terms of a truly encompassing study but still...

I know you asked about books but I want to recommend a lost shoegaze classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GJ9IhY6BpE

Ah, good starting points. Thanks Ned. I didn't know there was a Creation book.

Oh yeah, read that one immediately -- Alan McGee hated it, calling it the 'accountant's story' or something similar, but he is so ridiculously wrong (and also is completely trying to hide any take on his former label that can't be summed up as 'yeah I was this wild and crazy RAWK guy trashing the man every chance I get!' -- I mean god bless the guy for doing what he did at all, obv., but he's long been caught up in his own mythmaking).

I will!

The reason I'm even thinking about it is I started thinking about the aesthetic of obscured or effaced vocals. It didn't exactly start with shoegaze (and definitely didn't end with it) but that seems to be the genre that really embraced it. I've been going through my collection thinking about the antecedents to the style.

the aesthetic of obscured or effaced vocals

FYI this is a totally different subject than shoegaze!

Kinda like saying, "Is there an article about how shoegaze came about? I started thinking about the aesthetic of distorted, woozy guitar sounds..."

Which would be another perfectly apropos line of inquiry. But pgwp's topic seems like the more interesting one.

Yeah I recognize it's a bigger subject than shoegaze and thought I said as much. There are lots of avenues to go down and shoegaze is definitely one of them.

the just-reissued ashrae fax 'static crash' ep has some pretty special moments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyXicOwLriI

Really looking forward to this, as are the other 5 or 6 of you that bought the Still In A Dream box set!

https://thirdmanrecords.com/news/third-man-records-announces-southeast-of-saturn

https://third-man-records.imgix.net/d7eb161a-9098-4296-ad82-0a29e344dae3/unnamed.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=min&fm=jpg&q=80&rect=0%2C0%2C1200%2C1137

This looks really cool, thanks!

Here's one, a bonus Teenage Filmstars track. Hits the spot!! Amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec9RQrUAOYU

Just been listening to All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors (of whom three members guest on the incredible Dalek track Forever Close My Eyes) - Turning Into Small is a lovely album!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG4u0LR8nzo

I love that album and the band comes from a very middle of nowhere wooded town in a part of north New Jersey that you would only expect to hear dueling banjos. I was so flabbergasted that a top tier shoegaze band of all things came from there. I grew up a town away.

I love that band, & I had no idea they were from rural north New Jersey. That endears them to me even more, having grown up in Warren Co.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ce/09/bd/ce09bddec81ad6e0540aa1c59eda5090.jpg

[faint sounds of shoegaze in the distance]

aw <3

Not 100% gaze, but very much classic and perhaps a little overlooked -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA1qeKFQMIg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOOxUz7sXBY

Love Straightjacket Fits! What was the 2nd one supposed to be?

Maresn3st have you heard that Teenage Filmstars track I posted? Scratches an early Lilys / Drop Nineteens / Swervedriver itch for me.

Maresn3st have you heard that Teenage Filmstars track I posted? Scratches an early Lilys / Drop Nineteens / Swervedriver itch for me.

Yea!!! Love it, I got kinda Swirlies top notes from it too

The second YT? It's just another SF tune, Down in Splendour, Andrew Brough was def the gaze end of the band.

Ah OK cool; it's broken on my end.

Yeah definitely Swirlies too but they were always so focused, and to me this track has that zoned out feeling the bands I cited had the tendency to do, where it sounds like they're lost in the bliss of the chord changes and aren't guaranteed to snap out of it.

don't know their catalog well enough to know if they pulled out more like this one, but...

outrageous cherry, "if someone loves you"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32hDKDkSLOw

It's been awhile since I listened to anything else by them but I LOVE that album in particular

always loved the first smashing orange album. it is very derivative but all the same, it fucking rocks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HNOeXDHDaU

Me too. Someone taped stuck a few of their songs on the end of bootleg tape of a Ride concert for me in the summer of 91. I then spent a few hopeless months going into record shops trying to find anything by them and repeatedly being asked "Don't you mean Smashing Pumpkins?" until I gave up. I eventually found an album of theirs in 1993 which had at least one of the tracks from that tape on it (Not Very Much To See), but mysteriously had a very different version of My Deranged Heart on it. Another year passed and then I finally tracked down another album that had the 'proper' version on it. I don't actually know which of those albums came out first and I assume the group had split up long before I actually finally managed to buy them.

(A quick visit to discogs later) Weirdly it seems that both the albums I bought were released in 1991, but that the four songs originally taped for me were the A-sides and B-sides of two singles also released in 1991 (that also featured on the albums).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeSvPNFe6bg