Henry's Dress. Bust 'Em Green.

One of Slumberland’s best noisepop releases. The band has swept up the shrapnel from their debut into bristling piles of jagged, brightly colored confetti. Their shoegaze excesses have been condensed into blasts of garage punk mauling 60’s mod rock. You can see the genesis of the Aisler’s Set, but it’s a much, much louder, fuzzed-out version of what’s to come. When they’re going full tilt, they have a way of pummeling through a song with delirious abandon, which just digs the hooks in deeper. You may not notice them the first time, but soon you won’t be able to get Hey Allison, All This Time for Nothing, and Self Starter out of your head. It hurtles by in just under half an hour, so I’ve appended the songs from their 1620 single as a bonus.



Green

Butterglory. Downed.

Still feelin’ kinda 90s, so here’s some slackeriffic evanescent psychic pezz drops from Lawrence, KS duo Butterglory. I’ve seen numerous comparisons to Pavement (who, honestly, I never cared for) and Archers of Loaf (who I’m not all that familiar with), but to me they sound like a crackling, ragged wire version of Yo La Tengo’s Genius + Love. They were contemporaries of all those bands, so it’s not like they were trying to recreate that sound, it was apparently just some lo-fi virus going around at the time. Indie mono, in more ways than one.

Despite the comparatively lackadaisical attitude emanating from Matt Suggs and Debby Vander Wall’s vocals (I imagine this being recorded when neither member felt like getting off the couch), the songs are endearing, hooky, and melodic in a skewed, left-handed fashion where you’re never quite sure which way they’re going to swerve next. The melodies easily win out over the noisy, ramshackle trappings, and part of the magic is the way they paste together all the unpredictable, unpolished bits of buzzing guitar feedback, perky trap drumming, and cool boy/girl vocals into two minutes of hummable chaos.

Downed

Mercury Rev. Astoria Theater, London. 11/2/93.

A volcanic upwelling of psychedelic magma. A slow motion film of Neil Young crashing the Death Star face first into the unicorn sequence from Fantasia. A circus of jelly-bodied squid wobbling around the ring on unicycles, cards fluttering in the spokes.

It's the David Baker years, when a slippery black-light liquid ran thick in their veins. Back then, they could even out-flame the Lips.

1. Very Sleepy Rivers
2. Syringe Mouth
3. Something for Joey
4. Chasing a Bee
5. Meth of a Rockette's Kick
6. Boys Peel Out

Astoria

Update 10/7/10: VoltronsHead made a video for Meth of a Rockette's Kick, which you can now sample below.

Elf Power. Treasures From the Trash Heap.

I quite often describe bands as being the equivalent of some hypothetical cross-breeding of their influences. It’s rarely true and can unfairly diminish the singularly unique elements they’ve created. So without discounting the fact that Elf Power really are something wholly more and better than the sum of their antecedents, I think it’s fairly possible to draw an accurate, if inverted, phylogenetic map of their sound.

Really, it’s only because of how secure they are in their own identity that they can be so successful when revisiting the songs of their heroes. It’s why Nothing’s Going to Happen¹ is one of their best albums, and possibly the best representation of what they do, despite being made up entirely of covers. The Flaming Lips, Brian Eno, R.E.M., T. Rex, Wire, Sonic Youth, Jesus and Mary Chain, Roky Erickson, Robyn Hitchcock, The Buzzcocks, The Byrds, Hüsker Dü, and The Misfits all find some expression in Elf Power’s perfectly balanced mixture. Maybe it’s because their own songs—filtered and soaked in so many different elements—can function like a simultaneous mixtape that it’s so easy to like the band. They’re clueing you in to where they’ve come from and what they’ve loved along the way like your older sister sending you back all the cool bands she discovered in college.

This album was only available at their Back to the Web tour, and collects pretty much everything they’d done that never made it onto an album, or was only available as part of some other compilation you didn’t have. As an obsessive collector, I have to commend and thank them for really doing this type of album right. I want it all, and they’ve put it on here. Demos, more covers, a few live tracks, a remix, and a number of songs that just never saw the light of day. And they’re all really, really good. Historical Ant Wars rules. Back to the Web was a bit of a return to their old sound after a few albums that had found them stepping away from their early dive-bombing buzz, but Treasures From the Trash Heap is an even better encapsulation of the early days (although it covers every period). Like R.E.M.’s similar Dead Letter Office, it’s like getting to rummage around in your favorite band’s junk drawer. Without the pressure to create a coherent album, everything just reverts to being its own weird type of fun.

1. Temporary Arm (country version)
2. Face in the Sand (demo)
3. Feel a Whole Lot Better (Byrds cover)
4. Dandy in the Underworld (T.Rex cover)
5. Another Face (demo)
6. Hole in My Shoe (demo)
7. All the Same
8. Rise High Giant Fly
9. Historical Ant Wars
10. Empty Pictures (demo)
11. Princess Knows (Olivia Tremor Control cover)
12. Invisible Men (demo)
13. Dark Circles
14. Underneath the Bunker (R.E.M. cover)
15. Arrow Flies Close (live at Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto)
16. Blackbirds
17. Invisible Men (techno version)
18. Run Through the Forest
19. I Know I
20. Spiders
21. It's Not Cold
22. Reuters (Wire cover, live at Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto)
23. Honey (Spacemen 3 cover, live at the Landfill, Athens, GA)
24. The Slider (T.Rex cover)


1. Actually, A Dream In Sound and Creatures are the pinnacle of their work, but Nothing’s Going To Happen seems to hit right in the middle of what they’re usually aiming for.

Treasures

My Bloody Valentine. Loom. Vancouver. 7/1/92.

Amazing facts about My Bloody Valentine:

• Since its release in 1991, Loveless has been played on a continuous loop through underwater speakers, inspiring certain erotic feelings in cetaceans, and is single-handedly responsible for the resurgence of the Humpback Whale population
• Before being mastered, the original tracks were beamed into space, bounced off the rings of Saturn, and then filtered through a device that mimics the sound of dragonflies on absinthe.
• Loveless sounds the same in every known alternate universe.
• Early copies of the album came with packets of Dramamine to counteract wooziness.
• Not that I would know, but under certain influences you can actually listen to the album just by looking at the cover.
• The band was named after an unsuccessful Bing Crosby Christmas special.
• At least one track was created by dropping magnetic recording tape through the Aurora Borealis.
• Vinyl copies of Loveless actually contain minute trace amounts of love, Pixie Stix, and Kevin Shields’ pocket lint.

Loom

The Ecstasy of St Theresa. Susurrate.

Inspired by the divinely orgasmic states (in which she was bodily pierced by a flaming spear) described by the 16th century mystic nun, The Ecstasy of St Theresa take their namesake to heart, attempting either to replicate that holy delirium or inspire it through clouds of angelic vocals dissolving in a volcanic barrage of tremoloed guitars.

Apparently, they’ve long since switched to an ambient/techno sound, but in early 1992, they were reinterpreting Isn’t Anything era MBV as a Dvorakian noise symphony. As possibly the only shoegaze band in Czechoslovakia, The Ecstasy of St Theresa received what little attention they did after recording a session for the omnipresent John Peel. Even that didn’t translate into much success, and this album sank without a trace only to be rescued from obscurity nearly a decade later by the indispensable Clairecords.

Aside from the obligatory MBV references, The Ecstasy of St Theresa share plenty of DNA with Dinosaur Jr. and Catherine Wheel—pitching their blurred, thundering songs down a wind-tunnel of melodic, emotional shifts. They’re drowning you in sound, but they always keep their ear on the “big moment”, finally climaxing with the reckless, free-form maelstrom of Absinth. It may not be the most innovative or original recording of the shoegaze era, but it’s definitely a classic example of everything that so often made the genre so transcendently great.

Susurrate

The High Violets. 44 Down.

I was pretty sure these guys were British (probably as a result of discovering them in a record store during my one trip overseas), but it turns out they're from Portland. They could easily have been some lost band from the early 90s prime dream-pop/shoegaze period, sounding as they do like an otherworldly mix of The Field Mice, The Cocteau Twins, MBV, Lush, Spaceman 3, Galaxie 500, and Julee Cruise. Cool angelic vocals, waves of white light climaxes, and spooling gossamer guitar chaos make this perfect dorm-room make-out music. It's like mirrorballs as satellites.

44 Down

High Violets on myspace

Henry's Dress. Henry's Dress.

Long before founding the divine Aislers Set, Amy Linton fronted this noise-pop garage band on Slumberland Records. Here, her sweet, laid-back voice floats atop peals of crisp feedback and heavy bass-lines that judder and thump like a dragster down a dirt road. Chopping down early Jesus & Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, and Black Tambourine into a Phil Spectorish girl-group sound, Henry's Dress made heavily distorted and immensely fun bursts of messy pop.

Henry's Dress

Henry's Dress on myspace

An old interview with the band

Flaming Lips. Trippy Lip Shtick. Live at the Antenna Club, Memphis. April 1994.

Back when I got all my bootlegs from tape trading or independant record stores, this seemed to be the Flaming Lips show that turned up everywhere. And it is a really great set, from the height of their lime green and orange period. If I were a millionaire, I would pay them to get Ronald back in the band. That kid was a gee-tar genius.

Trippy

Flaming Lips official website

A Sunny Day in Glasgow. The Sunniest Day Ever & Tout New Age.

Pretty noisy/Noisy, pretty.

Everyone calls them shoegazers, so I guess I'll go along with that. It's not shoegaze like anyone I'm familiar with, though. The Sunniest Day Ever is a masterpiece of vertiginous, see-sawing rhythms and smashed glitter-ball textures that suggests an alternate universe Siouxsie Sioux/Cocteau Twins mash-up with severe equilibrium problems. I've never listened to it on headphones, but I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to do while standing. You know that sliding sensation you get just before fainting, where the world itself seems to have tilted before you realize it's actually you? That's what this sounds like. A Mundane Telephone Call to Jack Parsons is a whole new kind of awesome.

Tout New Age is a bit tamer, eliding into the sort of sound the Cocteau Twins were exploring on their later ambient remixes (this has become more pronounced on their latest release, Ashes Grammar). Not quite as fractured as thier first EP, but still adventerous and very pretty.

Sunniest

ASDIG official site

ASDIG on myspace

The Charlottes. Lovehappy.

One of the earliest shoegaze bands, The Charlottes had a harder edge than their billowy pals, My Bloody Valentine or Slowdive, though they never achieved the same levels of success. I think at the time they were regarded more like The Primitives, but it's hard to tell. They fell into that twee-band-with-a-distortion-pedal period that's just on the verge of the prime shoegaze years. It may just encompass this record, actually. They're much tighter than their shambolic forebears, each song a little candy sweetart. It's a short album—barely half an hour—but they managed to get the whole thing just right.

In other unbearably twee news, today is our eighteen year anniversary (my girlfriend and me, not this blog, obviously). So, if you're reading this, my dear Candy-O, I love you.

Lovehappy

V/A. I Might Walk Home Alone.

1. Shine! - Bite The Apple
2. The Bardots - Summerhouse
3. The Replicas - Culture Shock
4. Blair 1523 - Take Me There
5. Catherine Wheel - She Is My Friend
6. The Suncharms - Sparkle
7. Red Hour - Treat
8. The Suncharms - Wash Away
9. Cherry Forever - Spook
10. Basinger - Looking At Him
11. The Pushkins - Sea Egg
12. The Badgers - Cycleface
13. The Replicas - You Can Red
14. Storm House - Inside
15. The Hobbyards - Red Candle

I Might

Charm Pops. Unavailable.

Remember when the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev were putting out albums that captured bees inside jars and moths in incubators? Densely layered, buzzing, warbly, sugary, speaker-frying, pop weirdness? Do you miss that? Then you need this obscure gem in your collection.

Essentially the third Radial Spangle release (April Tippins and Alan Laird remain), it was produced by Mercury Rev's Dave Fridmann and featured two ex-Flaming Lips drummers. This is closer in spirit to their Syrup Macrame album, but looser, goofier, and more fun. I highly recommend the songs Gravity's Supple Truss and The Big Ol' World Without You.

Unavailable

Radial Spangle's wikipedia page

Rollerskate Skinny. Threshold.

I don't know if anyone remembers this band. They came and went without much notice, only releasing two albums and a handful of singles. If they get mentioned at all, it's to note that Kevin Shields' brother was a member. Released inbetween albums, this three-song EP isn't quite up to the flawless perfection of Horsedrawn Wishes (though, what is?), but you can tell they're taking the template they developed on Shoulder Voices (a mixture of early Mercury Rev's tilt-a-whirl symphonies, mid-period Flaming Lips' knack for a killer melody, and, of course, My Bloody Valentine's woozy blur) and fumbling towards something bigger.

Threshold

Rollerskate Skinny on myspace

Mixtape. 22 Bees.

Barbed pop songs shot like buzzing atoms into the center of your brain. Nothing that obscure. I wanted to make a mix that followed how twee and c-86 style songs gradually elided into noise pop and shoegaze. I think it flows nicely.

1. Another Sunny Day - Anorak City
2. Shop Assistants - All That Ever Mattered
3. Black Tambourine - Throw Aggi Off the Bridge
4. Pop Will Eat Itself - Like an Angel
5. Jesus & Mary Chain - Upside Down
6. The Vaselines - Son of a Gun
7. The Loft - Up the Hill and Down the Slope
8. The Close Lobsters - Pathetique
9. Bubblegum Splash - Just Walked Away
10. 14 Iced Bears - Inside
11. Autoclave - Dr. Seuss
12. The Flatmates - Happy All the Time
13. My Favorite - Homeless Club Kids vs. Future Bible Heroes
14. The Magnetic Fields - I'm Sorry I Love You
15. Elf Power - Nothing's Going to Happen
16. Pixies - Alec Eiffel
17. Flaming Lips - Frogs
18. My Bloody Valentine - When You Sleep
19. The High Violets - 44 Down
20. The Field Mice - Star of David
21. Cocteau Twins - Carolyn's Fingers
22. Galaxie 500 - Tugboat

Sorry, I had to split the download into two parts to get to fit under mediafire's 100mb limit.

22 Bees part 1
22 Bees part 2