Review Summary: whengaze
Shoegaze lesson #111: I find it helpful to place shoegaze by whether it works in- or out- of time. There’s a set of basic feelings that you can instantly pin on either category: whether all that fuzz is adding an extra layer of electrification or yearning to a glorious transient Happening, or whether it’s expansive enough to call the shots on a pocket limbo into which you, dear pal-buddy-friend, have wandered. The former camp’s gaze stylings tend to piggyback off dream pop or alt rock’s compact structures and hooks, while the latter places texture and mood as the overarching priority of any evident songwriting concerns. Common struggles faced by pop/rock-adjacent gaze generally lie in crafting tracks with enough weight or dexterity not to scan as shallow vehicles for pretty tones, whereas our bona fide dreamer-gaze faces a more abstract struggle to weave an atmosphere with enough depth or distinction to warrant such unshackling from the ever-distorted plane of time. The more immersive, the better; it’s a tough brief to glue your audience’s collective stares to the middle distance, working as unobtrusively as possible to avert their crystallisation upon the twin hands of the abominable wall-hugging clock that is always,
always lurking in the background.
Whew. Suddenly, there’s a whole lot at play within such an infamously mindless genre, but you’ve gotta know the risks. As dyed-in-the-wool occupants of the out-of-time—gaze ballpark, Bowery Electric built a short career on deft navigation of these pitfalls and offer a convenient number of case studies for exactly how to brew a good atmosphere. Seatbelts on.
Bowery Electric are best known for their 1996 opus
Beat, a forward-thinking fusion of shoegaze and trip-hop brimming at every turn with slow suspense, so sensitive to the spacious qualities of its parent genres that you could viably tune in to it as straight ambient. It’s rare to find a hybrid record that caters so evenly to the tastes of both its prospective audiences, and that kind of refinement isn’t built in a day. Sure enough, the group’s debut
Bowery Electric was a more traditional shoegaze experience with hints aplenty of the sounds they would incorporate on
Beat. These tracks’ average BPM may sit a little higher than outright spliff tempo, but they’re no less sluggish in their developments. This is thanks in no small part to the prevalence of guitarist Laurence Chandler’s soundscapes, more shimmer than fuzz and so amorphous as to jettison such concepts as tune and chord entirely (they’re in there somewhere, but the guitars are very much not how we chart them). Bowery Electric are delightfully savvy of the difference between being a shoegaze group and being a guitar group: the album’s melody is driven by Martha Schwendener’s sonorous bass parts, while its pacing and structural form bear a percussive focus largely uncommon to shoegaze.
This last part is key to Bowery Electric’s transcendence of temporal constraints: this record is as steeped in cyclical drum patterns as any electronic album, and its near-mechanical repetition of thoroughly organic rhythms will absorb the attention of a patient listener in just the same way. Take the early highlight “Next To Nothing”, whose beats are not trip-hop per se, but very much adjacent in their phrasing. They’re the bedrock upon which the track’s dense-distant haze finds increasing purchase and, eventually, intensity. Next to nothing (!!!) changes minute-to-minute, but the even subtlest elements of the song’s shifting dynamics carve out an electrifying presence to the point that they could carry on for twice as long and I’d hardly bat an eyelid; that ever-constant beat is the yardstick it’s all measured against. What a perfect use of six minutes, thirty seconds.
One song on, “Long Way Down” repeats this pattern with
slightly more kinetic beatwork and an ethereal vocal track; it’s not quite as good as “Next To Nothing”, but this is because it is two minutes shorter and works as more of a comedown for that track. Shoegaze lesson #112: this is how you sequence an album-atmosphere - and yet, as anyone who’s ever consumed a shoegazey album-atmosphere knows, consistent netherspace tastes a whole lot better with the benefit of a huge central highlight. The aptly titled centrepiece “Slow Thrills” gives the album its home run, a perfect slow-burning gazer that tests the waters with an quavering bassline before tapping into a dense current of distortion. Floodgates: open. The majority of the track churns forth in spellbindingly unbroken form for however long it took the band to stop recording, one of those infinitely loopable moments of magnetic genius that hardly beg any augmentation at all. This alone is worth the price of admission: an emphatically undefined unit of your time. Care to find out how long or short
Bowery Electric is[n’t]? I still have no idea of this record’s runtime, nor how long I have been tuned into it, nor whether it is appropriate either as a background productivity-booster or as crystal-cold subject matter for writing a
critical text. It is both out there and out-of-there, and it absolutely warrants your attention: let it make time for itself in the near future (when?!) and listen to it intently and passively for however long it takes. Godspeed, space cadets.
