The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa - Pigment

This EP is the first (and my favorite) release by the Czech shoegaze band The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. Pigment and the following album, Sussurate, both washed in with the wave of shoegaze in the early 90s. After Sussurate the band began to play electronica so I have not given any later albums a listen. But the first two releases, in particular the album, follow the MBV/Cocteau Twins sound.

There are four tracks on the EP and to me 1& 3 stand above the others. Maybe it has something to do with both titles containing apostrophes, but more likely the reason is that What's and Who's are poppier than Square Wave and Honeyrain. Still, the two lesser songs take notes from Loveless and are not bad at all. So listen to 1 & 3 if you like Isn't Anything and 2 & 4 if you like Loveless. Hopefully you, like me, love both and listen to the whole EP!

What's mp3
Who's mp3
Download EP

Ceremony and Thrushes live on WMUC

My college's radio is horrendous so I've taken to listening to other university stations online. Right now the University of Maryland has some great shows and DJs. They also pick up awesome bands for interviews and live performances. Today Thrushes and Ceremony were on the show. Thrushes is a shoegaze/dream pop band from Baltimore and Ceremony is a shoegaze band from Fredricksburg (look here for my post on their split LP with Screen Vinyl Image).

Thrushes were up first and I was surprised at how good they sounded. I listened to their debut album, Sun Come Undone, a while ago and nothing caught my ear. On the show they played new material that will appear on an upcoming releases. I especially like the second song, Trees.

Ceremony sounded great too. They played my favorite song, For Her Smile, and a few I had not heard before. In the interview they mention an already recorded album coming out this year. Cool!

You can download the complete radio show from WMUC's website. Right click and "save as" the Third_Rail_Radio_1800_2100 mp3. And tune in tomorrow at 1 PM for a live recording of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart!

Ringo Deathstarr

I am so glad to have stumbled upon Ringo Deathstarr through a listing on Pheer.com. I saw them live last year and bought the EP at the show. Just a fantastic band. I think this CD came out in 2007 and there is still no followup. But I just read that the EP is being rereleased on vinyl this March by Fan Death Records! And there will be more vinyl releases by the band this year. Give this EP as listen if you like shoegaze/noise pop. I had it on repeat for a while last year.

Go to their MySpace to find the dates for their March shows where you'll most likely be able to pick up the vinyl for cheaper than mailorder.

I can't wait to see them again in Arlington. And it's a house show too. Before they played in a tiny pizza place and it was perfect. Here's to small venues. Oh and The Vandelles will be there too. Another EP worth hearing; maybe I'll post it in the future.

Starrsha mp3
Sweet Girl mp3
Download S/T EP

Dead Leaf Echo - Pale Fire

Well this is cool. I never expected much to come out of this blog. I started it because I had way too much free time and figured I could spend some of that time introducing others to the bands I like. But last week I was contacted by the promoter for a group called Dead Leaf Echo. He offered to send me a copy of Pale Fire, the band's second EP, and after listening to some songs on MySpace I accepted.

Dead Leaf Echo come from New York and play shoegaze/dream pop with a tint of new wave. Think if Slowdive were from Manchester. Pale Fire starts off a bit rough with Warm Body which sounds out of place among the five tracks that follow. The second song, Thought Talk, is a better representation of the rest of Pale Fire with its male/female vocals and transition from soft and dreamy to noisy guitar sound about 3/4ths through. Other standout tracks are Tears and Cry The Sea.

You can listen to some tracks from Pale Fire as well as order the CD on Dead Leaf Echo's MySpace page.

Mister Loveless - My Share of Losing

Someone on Last.fm asked me for this so I thought I would post it here for everyone. I first read about this band through a music blog that posted an mp3 of Scatterplot off this album. I liked Scatterplot so much that I went and ordered My Share of Losing. After a month's wait and some confusion due to my school's shitty mail system I got the CD in the mail along with Mister Loveless' newest EP Two Words (for free! Very nice people).

Mister Loveless' sound is a nice mix of shoegaze and post-punk. The singer's droning voice sounds Ian Curtis inspired and many of the songs have pronounced JDish bass lines. A few songs break from this so the album is all over musically; the first track, Twiggy, is a surfy instrumental and Scatterplot is a guitar filled shoegazy song. I like My Share of Losing a lot. The EP, Two Words, represents a big change in the band's sound and I don't like it too much. Perhaps it needs another listen.

Check out the tracks below or download the full album. If you like it, buy the album from the band.

Twiggy mp3
Scatterplot mp3
Dream mp3
Download album

800beloved - Cassette Single

800beloved is a shoegaze band from Michigan that takes its name from a 1-800 phone number. They haven't released much and what they have I don't know where to buy. There is an LP on the way titled Bouquet but no word on when it will be available. So here are two songs from a single I found on the web. Out of all the songs I've heard from 800beloved, The Skeleton Collection is my favorite due to it being the song with the most audible post punk influences. So check it out!

The Skeleton Collection mp3
Download single

KG

Here's an obscure shoegaze band I found on Soulseek. The only info on KG I found is from here.

This one-man show released some hard to find 7'inches. Fantastic JAMC overload meets MBV and Boyracer. Wow!

If you know something else leave a comment!

The JAMC comparison is spot on. The first song on the Candy 7", by far my favorite, sounds like something off Psychocandy. I love it. The other releases have a few good tracks but the standout is Candy.

Candy Loves Me So mp3
Love Me Forever mp3
Download Candy
Download 987
Download From innocence To Catastrophe
Download The Greatest Hits

Ceremony / Screen Vinyl Image Split LP/CDR

Finally got this in the mail last week. I preordered months ago and the expected release was sometime in October but something came up and the split was delayed a long time.

Ceremony are from Fredricksburg, VA and formed from the remnants of Skywave when they broke up after the release of their second album, Synthstatic. They sound a lot like Skywave and are definitely on the noisier side of shoegaze. More Telescopes than MBV, maybe? Anyways, For Her Smile is now my favorite Ceremony track.

Screen Vinyl Image also come from north Virginia. DC, I think. I had never listened to them before this 12". I don't care too much for their songs on here but it is decent enough to warrant looking into whatever EPs they have out.

I need to catch both these bands live. I missed out on a show with both of them plus some other shoegaze band. Damn weekday metro schedule....

For her Smile mp3
Download LP
Buy it from Custom Made Music

Also, look what came in the mail today. It is beeeeeautifuuuuulll (click because it is best when viewed at maximum size)

LSD and the Search for God - S/T EP

First off, isn't this one of the best band names ever? Very awesome. On this EP are five great MBV/Slowdive sounding tracks with breathy male/female vocals that I love and can put on any hour of the day. This Time is my favorite but really the whole album just flows from track to track like The Comforts of Madness and it all comes together in a mass of dreamy bliss.

Everyone should buy this from Deep Space Recordings so the band can have the monies to produce an LP. The vinyl is beautiful clear yellow but I don't know if there are any more in stock (only 200 pressings in yellow, 800 were black). I sent the mailorder guys a message and will edit this post once I have a response. Because if there are some in stock there's no reason to buy the CD rather than the LP.

UPDATE: Holy shit that was fast. The label replied to my message in less than ten minutes. There are still a few in stock. $13.65 through Paypal!

Download

Moscow Olympics - Cut The World

This could possibly be my favorite release of 2008. Moscow Olympics come from the Philippines and play catchy pop music that sounds like all my favorite genres mashed into one. Cut The World is their debut album (or mini-album. It clocks in at under 30 minutes) and it is spectacular. Not a dull song on this disc! Here is what IndiePages has to say:

This Filipino group was the talk of the indiepop world after their single last year, and this mini-album is just further proof of their greatness - in case one was actually needed! If you missed 'em the first time around, the band plays dreamy pop with a very noticeable New Order influence (especially in the guitar melodies), in the same fashion as bands like the Airfields and the Radio Dept. Simply put, the result is stunning, with a sound that's lush and beautiful and dense with jangling guitars and ambient synths, and with the requisite Pale Saints-ish lost-boy vocal style that often goes along with this kind of music. And the melodies are immaculate, as well. The only fault I found was the drum rolls in the chorus of "Safe", which were rather conspicuously off-time; I know it's one of those things that not everyone would notice, but it definitely stands out to me, though it thankfully doesn't hinder my enjoyment of the song. Brilliant and recommended!

Selected tracks:
Second Trace
Safe
Buy Cut the World from Tonevendor

The biggest fault of Cut The World is that it doesn't include Moscow Olympics' best song. Their only other release was a 7" in late 2007 and the A-side, Still, sounds like it could have been released on Factory in 1982.

Still
Talk Like This
Download the 7"
Buy it from Tonevendor

Extra: Moscow Olympics demo download

My Bloody Valentine - Two live bootlegs

Seventeen years and hundreds of thousands of pounds later, Kevin Shields is again working on a My Bloody Valentine album.

Shields confirmed the rumours at the My Bloody Valentine-curated All Tomorrow's Parties festival this weekend, taking his earplugs out for long enough to talk to the New York Times. He will be returning to songs started over a decade ago, during abortive sessions for Island Records. "I realised that all that stuff I was doing in 1996 and 1997 was a lot better than I thought," he said.

-Guardian

When MBV tours for this album I will not miss them like I did this year.

Live at ICA, London June 13th, 2008 (first show in 16 years)
Tracks 1-10
Tracks 11-17
Live at Roundhouse, London June 21st, 2008.
Tracks 1-9
Tracks 10-16

Both end with a 20+ minute wall of sound. Enjoy!

Disco Ditto and other stuff by Az

I'm posting about this mainly because of a freak coincidence. While searching SoulSeek for some music I ran across a guy named "Disco Ditto." The name seemed familiar and it took a few minutes before I remembered listening to a band with the same name on MySpace a few hours earlier. I asked him if he was in the band and he said yes. He then told me about another band of his called Stellarium. Now, if the "Shoegaze/Shoegaze/Shoegaze" tag on Stellarium's MySpace or the dozens of references on Disco Ditto's page didn't tip you off, these two bands are shoegaze. Well, I guess it's called nu-gaze now that we're in the 2000s but whatever. MBV and JAMC inspired noisy music.

Disco Ditto released a free EP titled Into The Void earlier this year. Here is what Az has to say about it:

For starters, here’s a brief info:

Disco Ditto started as a one man solo project that I did to do stuff bordering on how I feel and for nostalgic purposes. It was 2004, and I was concurrently in Valium, a post punk band, and in Athena Flight, a shoegaze band which had lotsa potential and songs but fell out in the end. So in the midst of being in those two bands I decided to do something for myself as a way to remember particular feelings and emotions. And that’s when I recorded Love in a total time span of 13 hours at home on my busted computer. A few other songs fell through from there, some good, some bad, but it was personal to me.

In the path through time, I met different sets of individuals who expressed interest and liking in the songs, though I thought they were merely simplistic and too personal for anyone to comprehend, these three individuals joined the band and now it has evolved into a complete band with different sounds entirely, in which I’m glad and interested in exploring. I have since decided to let go of the EP as a sign of a closing chapter, and the opening of a new one with the current line-up.

I hope you guys will enjoy it, and treat it as a walk down memory lane yourselves.


Love,

Az

Disco Ditto

Download Into The Void or head to MySpace and preview the tracks

Unlike Disco Ditto, Stellarium is not a one man project. You can head over you their MySpace to listen to some tracks. Drift, my favorite, has a definite Slowdive feel to it. Very relaxing and smooth.

As a bonus, here is a song Az had on his SoulSeek. It is from a band called Athena Flight which is yet another band he played in. In the quoted message about Into The Void he mentions Athena Flight disbanded. I'm not sure if there are any other recordings out there, but this one is nice.

Athena Flight - Away From The Sun

Either Deerhunter were so loud they puréed my bowels or I shouldn't have eaten Taco Bell

Something clicked inside me when Deerhunter stopped playing and announced Barack Obama had broken 270 electoral votes. I felt as if the world had been altered. President Bush still sits in his throne and the economy remains in turbulence but my chest warmed to the news. For the rest of the set I completely lost myself in the noise. A blissful wall of sound underlain by Bradford Cox's vocals washed away every anxiety. And though I knew no promised change would be seen until January 20th, the streets of Washington, D.C. professed that it had come sharp at 11 o'clock. Hollers and sirens and honks echoed around the city blocks. People blanketed an entire intersection, blocking traffic. Bits of the 93% of D.C. that voted for Obama sprawled all of U-Street, cheering his victory. It was incredible. Never before have I seen such unity achieved through an election.

The DCist pointed out that perhaps Deerhunter made a poor choice in playing election night. For me, November 4th made the show. Decades from now some kid will be digging through my old CDs, find Cryptograms, and I will recall the night Obama was elected. I will tell him how everyone came together on the corner of 14th and U and hopefully he will have never experienced the opposite.

Deerhunter put on a fantastic show. They played tracks off both Cryptograms and Microcastle, their newest release. The sheer volume made up for the disappointing omission of Strange Lights. Days later my ears are faintly ringing but that has only encouraged me to fill silence with music. I eagerly await the band's next visit to D.C.

If you haven't listened to Deehunter yet, go buy Cryptograms and Microcastle right now.

Deerhunter - Oh It's Such A Shame
Jay Reatard cover from Jay Reatard/Deerhunter split 7"
Deerhunter - Agoraphobia
From Microcastle
Deerhunter - Strange Lights
From Cryptograms