Earlier this week, the very welcome news arrived that 1990s U.K. shoegaze legends Slowdive will be reuniting later this year after an almost 20 year absence. So far, only a pair of concert dates have been announced, in England and Spain respectively, but it seems highly likely that more will soon follow. And the band's even talking about writing and recording new material together already.
This is stop-the-presses type news here at The Way Out, as we're massive fans of Slowdive. And indeed, when the reunion news broke on Tuesday night, we quickly scrapped our planned continuation of last week's early U.S. punk and hardcore show (don't worry, we'll return to it soon) and threw together a set of classic late 1980s and early 1990s shoegaze music in Slowdive's honor.
In choosing a shoegazing playlist, we decided to focus on only the initial crop of mostly U.K. acts who were first grouped together under the "shoegaze" banner (though we also included a couple of their U.S. contemporaries, namely Swirlies and Lilys). Shoegaze is quite a nebulous concept - at best a "sound" or "style" rather than a specific genre, scene, or "movement" - and as a descriptor it gets thrown around very loosely today. To put it more bluntly, the term shoegaze gets grossly misapplied. In our minds, the term belongs to a specific style of indie/alternative rock music that existed for just a handful of years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that was performed by a relatively small cadre of bands. But that's perhaps a debate best left for another time and place. Suffice it to say, the bands we chose to feature represent the style's "first wave," if you will, and some of its most prominent purveyors.
Here's the playlist from our Thursday, January 30, 2014, broadcast:
LoOp - "Arc-Lite (Sonar)"
Slowdive - "When the Sun Hits"
The Telescopes - "Flying"
Chapterhouse - "Pearl"
Pale Saints - "Sight of You"
Swirlies - "Sarah Sitting"
My Bloody Valentine - "Come in Alone"
Lush - "De-Luxe"
Ride - "Nowhere"
Slowdive - "Catch the Breeze"
Swervedriver - "Sci-Flyer"
Lilys - "The Hermit Crab"
Listen to archived streaming audio of this show here now (playable in Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, Opera, and Safari browsers):
You can also stream audio of the show via SoundCloud by following this link: January 30, 2014
