The High Violets - Chinese Letter

Previously we saw the High Violets in hardcore shoegazing mode in Sun Baby.  

Now, in Chinese Letter, we find them exploring Dream Pop territory.

But what keeps this song firmly grounded in the Shoegazing tradition is the burning guitar that bursts in at 1:34 and 2:28 to remind us that these guys kick ass.  They're not going to wimp out and drift off into Belle-and-fucking-Sebastian territory as long as they've got that guitar.

This could be a Cocteau Twins song.   And as far as shoegazing credibility goes, that's about as high as the praise gets.

My Bloody Valentine - Sometimes

You have to listen to this one loud, preferable in headphones, or it won't work.

This song is entirely about texture.  Kevin Shields is redefining what a guitar can do, using feedback and distortion almost like a separate instrument, a disembodied wash of harmonic sound that feeds on itself and merges with itself in layers too complex to understand. You have no choice but to surrender to it.  

If you listen carefully, you can hear the pick strumming the guitar strings, but because the guitar sound is now abstracted away into a self-sustaining haze of distortion, the strumming has become divorced from it, the picking now a mere percussion instrument, like a stick stroking a washboard.  

This song is said to be popular with heroin addicts.  I've never tried heroin, but this almost makes me want to.

You can read more about My Bloody Valentine in my post about Soon.

Bonus Video
Here's a 3-minute clip from a BBC retrospective, 30 years later, with Kevin Shields talking about his guitar sound:

The Dandy Warhols - Nietzsche

The Dandy Warhols are not a shoegazing band, or even a nu-gaze band.

But sometimes they stick a toe in the shimmering shoegaze water, and when they do, the result is sublime.

Nietzsche, with its droning, monotonous vocals and fuzzed-out guitars is about as shoegazing as the Warhols get.

One of my favorite turn-of-the-millennium bands, the Warhols were frustratingly uneven, producing one or two groundbreaking, glorious songs per album, admid a bunch of less-inspired stuff.  But maybe that's true of most bands.

In any case, those few glorious songs added up over a career to a body of work that makes the Warhols one of my all-time favorite bands, albeit only in a greatest-hits sort of way.

Among their other (non-shoegazy) work, you might want to check out these songs (I'm not going to link to them, because they don't fit the shoegaze parameters of this site, but you should check them out):

Godless
Bohemian Like You
Good Morning
The Last High