wake me when it’s over please (i.e. shoegazing).
A good friend contacted me rather out of the blue this late evening. She and I had fallen out of touch, seeing each other randomly but never as planned and always oddly.
At which point I had simply passed the friendship and whatever affections I had off as a mere trifle, done and gone. Surprisingly though, we ended up talking and she said she heard a song that reminded her of me.
This song being from Longwave, from the record “The Strangest Things”
That she contact me at all was enough to be happy for the evening, but the record is a rarity amongst a lot of music collectors and should be well listened to, if only for really taking shoegazing to a point that had been up to 2003, lacking blood behind it. I will readily admit that, If I had purchased this album on vinyl, the grooves would have worn flat years ago.
Titles and “genres” are frustrating and useless but Shoegazing is a wonderful exception, full of wild leaps from electronic music to indie punk and pop. We hear M83 and Hammock mentioned in near sentences, Sigur Ros and The Album Leaf given praise for their elements of shoegazing and a general, wonderful shimmer the style adds to music as a whole and the multiple applications available. It’s like turning a light on in the dark room that is much of modern music.
Shoegazing if you are not familiar is so coined for the fact that its many contributors to the style are often preoccupied with controlling the many effects (although primarily reverb) such that they must look downward towards their foot pedals throughout large parts of songs on stage. That and many of these artists are bloody neurotic and don’t like people looking at them. That or they don’t like people to think they like being looked at. For all it’s silliness and hipster acceptance (the bane of good music), shoegazing really has some wonderful contributors, but for a track with a backbeat included, that’s the strict purview of Longwave.
This band was the last thing MTV handed to me on a silver platter. The last thing of worth anyway. You remember when MTV still played music right? After getting home late from a bar one evening, I turned on the TV, MTV was the channel on and Longwave in their first video “Wake Me When It’s Over” started. I bought the record immediately, listened to it constantly and obsessed about it. I had, not at that point known what this sound was and it was really a moment in time. I was stuck inside the long range guitars, the near pure tone of the reverb. And how finally, this wonderful young vocal spoke right in between the wall of guitars, clear as day, clean as rain.
It’s almost two bands: 1.) The Longwave with the drummer who simply walks through each song with small breaks here and there. The bassist reinforces the vocalist’s Steve Schiltz urban, youthful and softly powerful voice.
Then there are the guitars of Longwave, a world onto their own. The guitars are a reinterpretation of the Wall of Sound, they leap out throughout the stereo spread. Some of Longwave’s songs have crushing weights of reverberating guitar and beautiful texture in the tone, subtle rhythms echoed over and over. All the songs have clicks and echos and near paranoia inducing details, but the first record especially, is visceral in its distortion, its science fiction verb and immanent wanting of someone or something.
This again reminds me that people and music are connected in many more ways than we understand.
Longwave’s first record is sadly, the only case of this wonderful, exceptional sound. I do not know where the real longwave went, but 2003 was the last time they have been seen or heard from.
For absolute insanity, Dan Le Sac decided to produce a track for KID A called “Wasnotwas”. If you could fit this into a record store, I invite you to name the section.
I would also recommend the Chemical Brothers new project, called Further. I believe the title is in reference to the Furthur Festival, where I smoked pot for the first time, saw people dropping way too much acid, repeating everything they heard. All that while watching a band named Spicy Tuna. To say this record is psychedelic, or even a trip is an understatement. A bad trip or a good one I have not yet decided.
Keep your headphones on folks, it’s only gets louder.
_backchat.
