When listening to a record for the first time, I can usually tell within the first thirty seconds of song one if I’ll want to hear it through, skip to song two (or deeper) in search of the chords and vocals that will connect with me, or stop it and never look back. There are also occasions when song one gets repeat playback because it’s so good. And then the same happens with song two. And song three. Music lovers understand this “Eureka!” moment.
Maybe Someday by Tombstones In Their Eyes was my 2019 “Eureka!” moment.
Comprised of John Treanor (vocals/guitar), Josh Drew (guitar), Mike Mason (bass) and Stephen Striegel (drums), Tombstones In Their Eyes is a band from Los Angeles that appeals to fans of psych, noise, shoegaze, alternative, and even sludgy doom metal. James Cooper, an old school friend of Treanor’s now living in New York, is also considered a member as he helped start the band and works with him on song creation. The band released a number of EPs, including 2017’s Fear which was my first introduction to their signature melodic yet crunchy sound, and 2018’s Nothing Here.
On November 15th, 2019, Somewherecold Records released Maybe Someday, and what could be described as a well-polished, cohesive collection of gritty psych-infused noise rock songs.
There is an immediate feeling of immensity on album opener “Open Skies” and the tangibility of this “bigness” caries throughout the title-track and “I Want You”, amplified by the swirl of guitars and the drone of Treanor’s ethereal vocals. Bass lines and drums are clean and not overstated, effectively complimenting and driving forward the wash of sound enveloping them.
“Down In The Dirt” has a decidedly sludgier feel to it that fans of Philadelphia’s Nothing will appreciate and is a personal favourite, of many favourites, on the album. Coming in at just shy of six minutes, it’s best played loud, with eyes closed and head bopping.
When listening to the “The One”, it’s not at all surprising that Treanor listed Electric Wizard as one of his favourite bands in our 21 Disarming Questions interview. It’s a dark and heavy stoner rock song, yet feels not at all out of place on Maybe Someday. Like “Down In The Dirt”, it pushes the six minute mark, but I’d welcome an extra long extended version of this one. It’s that good.
Another shift in direction happens on “I Believe”, the most upbeat song on the album and closest to a “traditional” alternative/psych song before we slow down and slide back into the fog of “I Can’t Feel It Anymore” and “Up And Down” that fans of The Black Angels will surely enjoy. We leave Maybe Someday with “Dreams”, an aptly-named soundscape of surreal fuzzed-out guitars, vapory vocals and keys.
Tombstones In Their Eyes manages to interlace so many sounds into Maybe Someday without defining the album as any one genre nor lose the mood set out from the album’s opening notes. It’s a perfect balance and pace and warrants repeated play through from start to finish.
Easily one of the best albums released in 2019 was Maybe Someday by Los Angeles psych shoegazers Tombstones In Their Eyes released by Somewhere Cold Records. We’ve been fans of the band since they first caught our attention back in early 2018 with their release of their Nothing Here EP, and the new record delivers more of the noisy droning melodies we loved from the start. Fans of The Black Angels and Nothing will definitely dig this band.
We asked vocalist and guitar player John Treanor our 21 Disarming questions about music, art and life in general. This is what he told us.
DISARM: What are you listening to right now?
John: Soundtrack of our Lives – Broken Imaginary Time
What was the first LP/tape/CD you remember owning?
The Kinks (can’t remember which record, but it was from the mid-60’s with some of the great stuff on it). Bought it at a garage sale and thought I was buying The Beatle’s Magical Mystery Tour because that’s the sleeve the record was in, haha. The 7-year-old me was very confused.
Vinyl or CD/Digital?
The cool answer would be vinyl, but I am on board with digital. I get to play my favorite music from my laptop (or the cloud, really) through a great pair of Sonos speakers via Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Spotify, Pandora and my own music collection online. So I sit and listen in the living room all day while I work. And this brings up a point about me as a music listener. I’m really a song person; there were days when I listened to whole albums but mostly I look for the song or songs that really do it for me and then put them in a playlist (remember mix tapes? – god I loved making mix tapes).
Editors: Mix tapes were everything!
What are your favourite bands?
A lot to list. Old Rolling Stones, Spacemen 3, Pussy Galore, Butthole Surfers, The Cramps, Black Flag, GBH, Elton John (early stuff), Aerosmith (same – early), Germs, Devo, Beach Boys, Interpol, Turbonegro, Built to Spill, The Byrds, Ministry, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Rammstein, EyeHateGod, Dandy Warhols, Metallica (early) Songs:Ohia/Magnolia Electric Co. “Newer” bands that are faves: Jesus on Heroine, Guitaro, Frankie Teardrop Dead, Power Trip, Electric Wizard, The Black Angels, Magic Shoppe, Film School (only their first ep, though), Rev Rev Rev, Chatham Rise. I could go on and on.
Editors: The latest from Rev Rev Rev is a favourite of 2019 too!
Why do you live where you do?
Good weather, although I complain about the heat sometimes. Friends. Good music scene. Work. Nice little house with a nice wife and 4 dogs/4 cats.
What is your favourite journey?
New York. I go at least once a year by myself to visit my friend James (who founded the band with me) and just soak it in. I get my own place and just dig the city. No plans, no tourist junkets, just whatever I want to do each day. Oh yeah, and comedy shows. New York is great for comedy.
What’s your idea of a perfect Sunday?
No work. Time to go down to the basement and try to write a song/riff or two. A nap in the afternoon with the 4 dogs all around me. Hanging out with my wife, Karin, in the evening and watching something good.
Photo by: Cathryn Farnsworth
What essentials do you take on a plane or tour bus?
Kindle. Music. Toothbrush/toothpaste, haha.
What is your dream vacation if money was no object?
It was Hong Kong, but I don’t know about that now. Maybe Japan.
What do you do with 4 hours to yourself in a new city?
Good coffee. People watch. Read the local papers, if I can understand the language. Walk around and do more people watching. Find an interesting part of town or maybe a museum.
What inspired you to take up music
Music has been critically important to me since I was very young. My father took me to see the Rolling Stones in 1975 when I was 10 and was very into music himself. Punk rock changed my life musically and opened me up to so much new music (not just punk rock, whatever that means now). I had to be around music and started little bands, managed a friends band on some tours and finally got around to learning to write songs of my own. I came into it later because I had some “substance abuse issues” standing in the way, but once I got it together enough to keep a guitar out of the pawnshop I just kept doing bands.
What was your most memorable day job?
Working at my uncle’s auto wrecking yard when I was in my late teens. It was a crazy, lawless scene down by the border of San Diego and Baja Mexico. Full of speed freaks and weirdness. Crazy time.
What advice should you have taken but didn’t?
Tell my mom I wanted guitar lessons instead of piano lessons. I still can’t play guitar worth a shit, but enough to write songs.
What should everyone shut up about?
I’m a live and let live type, just keep it out of my face, haha.
Who’s your ideal dinner guest, living or dead, and what would the menu be?
James Ellroy, steak at the Pacific Dining Car in downtown Los Angeles.
Who is your favourite hero of fiction?
I like spies, but not the James Bond type, so I’ll say George Smiley from the LeCarre novels.
What was the best live gig or music festival you attended (as a fan or artist)?
Rolling Stones 1975, Capitol Centre, Maryland – changed my life. Last year, Power Trip at the Regent in downtown LA. Those guys are on fire.
What are your “must” read magazines, news, websites, blogs?
I read the NY Post and Daily News every day, haha, for my taste of NY city life, and the NY Times, LA Times, Guardian. Dangerousminds.net, Please Kill Me Online. Brooklyn Vegan. Slate, especially Dear Prudence. A little Daily Beast and Buzzfeed. Digg is a good source of some excellent reads from around the web. And one of my most relaxing reads is Ask A Manager (askamanager.org) – I can’t explain that one.
Name something you consider a mind-altering work of art.
For me it’s all the music I listed earlier and the shows I saw as a kid. Going to see the Cramps in a small hall in San Diego when I was 16, The Gun Club, Stranglers, Christian Death, Black Flag and many more shows that I can’t remember now. That stuff literally altered my mind. And the most mind blowing day of all was when I went down to Licorice Pizza in Pacific Beach (San Diego) and picked out two records based on their covers – The Germs (GI) and Devo’s Duty Now For The Future. My mind was blown when I played those records at home in my bedroom. The Germs were so dark and harsh and Devo just did what they do and it really opened me up to a whole new world.
What does the next 6 months look like for you?
We are currently rehearsing for our first show in a while – a vinyl release show. The vinyl is coming in soon and it looks fantastic. Then, once we’re up to speed and I know the songs, haha, probably some more shows. And at the same time, we want to record 4 more songs to put on Side 4 of our planned vinyl compilation – we’re going to take all the earlier EP’s and singles and put them together on a double record set. Those songs deserve vinyl. Then there is a possible rumor of a European tour but that’s more than 6 months away.
Which musician rule do you agree with? Always meet your heroes or never meet your heroes?
I would say always meet your heroes. It’s okay if they’re dicks sometimes.
Thanks John! Go get Maybe Someday on CD or digital download from Bandcamp today, and coming soon to vinyl.
Italian Shoegazers, Rev Rev Rev, have released Kykeon via Fuzz Club, a crunchy 10-track album that is as much a marriage of doomy metal and psych as it is a reverb drenched Shoegaze album.
Kykeon moves along slowly, but threateningly giving it a lava-like quality; sludgy, thick, deadly and unstoppable. Tracks “3 not 3” and “Sealand” are great examples of this.
There are a few lighter moments. Mid-way track, “One Illusion Is Very Much Like Another” dials back the abrasive fuzz in favour of crisp guitars and unsuppressed vocals, as does “Summer Clouds”, but the menace is still there, barely hidden beneath the surface.
More “metal” moments include “Gate Of The Dark Female” that could pass for a Black Angels/Sleep collaboration, which is never a bad thing and album single “Clutching The Blade”, the fastest of Kykeon’s songs that has an early Smashing Pumpkins vibe that will guarantee repeat listens.
Kykeon is a perfect record for those that enjoy a band that can mix genres without losing cohesiveness. Psych, Doom, Shoegaze and Alternative all play their part to keep the record fresh and interesting throughout all 10 tracks.
Buy Kykeon on CD and vinyl from Fuzz Club HERE or digital download on Bandcamp.
At Lee’s Palace, NOTHING’s music erupts; it doesn’t wait to be asked, and yet it’s the antidote to what ails us and what still feels hopeless tomorrow. Because there is always a new strain, a pop musical pandemic spreading like the one we are exposed to right now. Once in a great while, once in a generation, music may upend the balance and let authenticity, rage, grief, and pure, uncut art blast through to the masses. This time is here and now. There is nowhere to go from here. Pop music’s stars with their dead eyes are more than ever, cynical, manufactured monsters. There’s no fun in pop left: it’s fascism, it’s death. It’s child abuse. Kids need to hear those minor keys and feel the vibrations from the floor of the rock club and be present. Luckily for us, in plain view of the suits, a generation of kids with moms who listened to college radio to get through the longest nights have picked up the guitars and have the sly, innate talent to B & E this rigged musical game.
Only once every few years, something comes along that vibrates the body at a primal level with the feeling ofimminent danger one minute, and the flicker of impossible to believe happiness the next minute. Impossibly, this music understands you, speaks to you, slaps you in the face; turns things cinematic for a little while in your little apartment, in your little head, in your little life. For us, love’s gotta be like that: something that has those perfect layered harmonies, that revels in its human fragility, a voice or an instrument that has risen because of need and will, not because they heard they should be up on stage all their life. Maybe, sometimes, like the greatest the game has ever known, too many lost to us now, because they heard no encouragement at all. Maybe they heard nothing, except how to somehow survive, just like they did as kids. Like too many of us kids. Music like this comes from outsiders, from the self-made, from nihilists who are really brokenhearted romantics.
It spills from somewhere tough and genuinely rough, whether the poorest parts of so many American towns, The Ramones’ gritty world view of the Five Boroughs; the decaying English city so far north of the center that London cab drivers stop and ask you why you’d ever want to go there, a place the rags call “STAB CITY”, a place that feels as homey & safe as your own misunderstood rough one. Great music comes screaming out of rainy, starkly beautiful drug-addled hubs that have hidden depths of so many scarred, beautiful souls. It comes, too, from normal looking families that are secret battlegrounds for a hundred different private family reasons.
When things are dark, we each have our own private darkness. Yet, the dark nothingness is today’s shared cultural touchstone: we’ve all been sad and anxious for a really long time. It’s dark out here in the anti-social media world. Every click, every feed, contains semi-random snapshots that hold potential to delight, astound, cause a belly laugh, anger, disgust, repulse. Baby animals; kids saying the darndest things; Mommy making a Vine instead of reacting humanely to a child’s embarrassment, shame or pain; disgraceful news media showing ISIS pictures before we can agree to look; people who are shamefully wealthy and famous for nothing at all any good. But dat ass… These things all scroll by as if they are all one neutral thing, while we wonder why we can’t sleep anymore.
Music fans are either old enough to remember that new music was an event and trips to the record store a sacred ritual, or were were born just in time to miss all that; when the last great true organic moment happened in music. For a while, the game board was smashed and 90’s Alternative music ruled, only to have it die too young, leaving a gaping shotgun hole and shoved off screen before the body was even cold, in time for the widow’s makeover for Hollywood, when punk died again and capped its teeth, to our horror. In the void left by Kurt, oppuetunistic wolves chomped down on the scraps and chaos, opening the door to worse, pop music than ever before. Hole’s kinderwhore and the Riot Grrrls, too, were gone and Britney’s glossy porn schoolgirl was the shape the world’s grief took.
But music, even then, was not yet devalued, compressed and made only to be shoved into our ear holes, enjoyed alone on our phones, stolen from digital space, an ineffective tool to survive the daily grind. In the last great Alternative wave of the 90’s, the idea that all the record stores, most of the dive bars, rock clubs and their peripheries- the shared public cigarettes at the side doors of these spaces in all the cities would disappear because of file compression technology was still dystopian Science Fiction. Its become our dull reality. It needs to be burned down. Internet and social media channels are almost all we have. Likes and shares are really less than nothing and invite both indifferent pats on the head and offer a whistling void of indifference if we don’t share a hive mind or have a cute kid or kitten to flaunt, but they’re what we have-and for now, but not forever, have replaced the real tour posters that used to flourish in a city before we were told to see them as wasted dead trees and knew them instead, as necessary, vital fuel, art actually worth buying and stealing and the only news that mattered to us in the street.
Nothing, in May 2014, were unknown to us, and this magazine did not yet exist (was just a title floating on a webpage with a couple of disjointed articles and photos). Dave was shooting a late night showcase for CMW (Canadian Music Week) and was there to see another band. CMW is a really mixed bag and tries every last nerve for devoted fans, naturally overstuffed with all the windbags of the jaded local & visiting media, who are there to gossip and bitch like old women, loudly, arms folded, in small venues while indie musicians work before a wall of indifference. Bands gig at insane times like 3 a.m. or worse, 2 p.m. Waiting for the headliner, Dave’s expectations were upended with this strange combination of rough looking indie dudes in Depeche Mode t-shirts with Morrissey tattoos. As the wall of noise hit him, he turned, gobsmacked, to a couple of Ride or Die fans who were freaking the fuck out, up from Philly. “They’re Nothing. They’re from Philly!” And that was it, the week was over, the night was over, the schedule was over. It was the moment a photographer who became that to pursue his drug of choice, music, found The One.
NOTHING’s music, with its roots in hardcore, authentic music love and natural, raw talent, makes for a tight and exciting live show that infuses the rock club with stadium-sized energy. It knows just when to quit, leaving you wanting another hit. It hooks the listener who knows what it means to be Guilty of Everything and Who is Tired of Tomorrow. This music acknowledges it all, brings it out into the light, and transcends all of that ugly. It comes from dark places and hits us where we live. It takes the bleakness of now and makes it tolerable, even beautiful.
Real rock critics in the old days and biblical power of print could love wildly as well as pan mercilessly, but wielded their power with a deep, uncorruptable knowledge and argument for why they were doing either thing. The media is dead. Everyone’s a rock critic now. So be one. Buy into the Alternative bands you love. Spread the word. Ignore the pop vacuum, even the easy joke. Screw ironic detachment. Break something. Start a riot. Remember what it was the first time you heard The Jesus & Mary Chain, The Cure, Nirvana, or Slowdive. NOTHING in 2015 is transcendent, a light flickering in its own darkness. It’s a long awaited answer to Jane’s Addiction whenSummertime Fucking Rolled; the The Cure who’ve always remade genre to their own orbit and are still as dark and rich as your best ever dream despite their subversive pop hits, who bent the world. Nothing’s music, across two albums now, still new, you can still say you were there, is an illegal fire, an uncontrolled burn to fight our endless winter chill.
We’ve got a new Shoegazer playlist up featuring some pretty amazing songs. A few of these have been on a looping repeat in the Step On household. That is when we haven’t been playing Suede songs!
This playlist features Valet, Forsaken Autumn, SeaDance, No Climate, GrowHouse, The Snowy Owls, The Ambient Light, Softt, Eerie Glue, and Rancho Relaxo.
Adam Hammond spoke to Andy Came and Joe Hatt of Spectres to discuss their stunning debut album, Dying, and that Record Store Day controversy….
It’s what Record Store Day has become: just another event in the annual music industry circus, co-opted by major labels and used as another marketing stepping stone … U2 have already shat their album into our iTunes, why should they constipate the world’s pressing plants with it too? … Because of the rules and regulations (minimum pressing amounts, no direct to customer sales, blah blah blah) Record Store Day really isn’t fun, and it’s certainly not beneficial to small, backs to the wall labels … but we are still affected by it. Badly.
Amid the echoes of self-congratulatory backslapping and the chimes of overflowing cash registers, another Record Store Day came and went, filling eBay with overpriced excrement and leaving the major record labels wallowing in the cataracts of abundance. As they gorged themselves on plenty, it would have been easy for them to ignore a lone voice of protest from two small British independent labels whose complaints in reality mattered as little as a gob in the ocean, but not so. Any barbs aimed at the most holy cash cow needed to be ruthlessly stamped out and Sonic Cathedral and Howling Owl became the subject of much ridicule as the argument was dragged on to the national stage. Why, reasoned the minnows, who kept the pressing plants in work for 365 days a year, should their business be put on hold while the majors clogged up the chain of production making picture discs of A-ha records that could be bought for a few pence in any local charity shop? A moot point you would think, but there was to be no debate. RSD was the insulin that kept the lifeblood of the music industry stable; to question it bordered upon insanity. This, the majors sneered, was all a publicity stunt by two small labels desperate to sell a few records. Talk about missing the point. Sonic Cathedral couldn’t sell their latest release because they couldn’t get it re-pressed. And they needed it re-pressed because it had sold out on the day of its initial release with barely a whisper of publicity. What they needed were records, and how dare a record label need records in RSD month.
The album that caused all the fuss was Dying, the debut from Bristol-based four-piece Spectres, a record that flew out of the shops as quickly as it arrived. Sometimes it simply seems the time is right for a band who transcend all of the usual hype to find favour with the minimum of fanfare, and that was certainly the case for Spectres whose approach to their career had been anything but high profile. The band had pressed a hundred copies of their Hunger EP on their own Howling Owl label in 2013 and there had been 250 copies of “The Sky Of All Places” single released by the Too Pure Singles Club in 2014, but that had been it. Spectres had played live, and featured in Wire’s DRILL festival, but the sheer impact made by Dying was as remarkable as it was unpredictable.
Andy Came: We were surprised about how much attention the album received, most of the reviews and press were amazing. The first pressing of the vinyl sold out on the day Dying was released and we were genuinely shocked. We were then told it would take three months for the re-press to arrive due to the clogging up of vinyl pressing plants because of the same old shit being reissued for RSD. We toured Greece in early April and couldn’t take any copies of the album with us to sell because we didn’t have any. It was definitely a hindrance. The whole point of the protest against RSD was to raise awareness that the music industry is controlled by the mainstream and was not helping the little guys like Spectres/Howling Owl and Sonic Cathedral get by. We were surprised at how much attention the statement got; they are still making their millions on reissue after reissue so why should they care?
Photo courtesy of Spectres
The unusual aspect of Spectres’ success is that their music is by no means accessible, being dark, difficult, dense, and deliberately confrontational. Inspired by a host of No Wave artists, the band fill their songs with sheets of noise, built layer upon dancing layer, and have talked of their desire for their music to drag audiences into their own personal black holes. Hell, the album itself is titled Dying, has a cover picture of a drowning man, and is themed around, well, death. And after the warning sirens of opener “Drag” there is no let up from the dramatic sonic assault. Yet, Dying is no mere attack on the senses and Spectres are not a band to shout in a storm. Their use of noise is considered, textured and shaped to purpose. The incredible “This Purgatory” both hums and howls, veering from the cries of whales in a boiling ocean to full throttle chainsaw massacre. It carries you tenderly before dropping you off a cliff. Spectres don’t use noise as a cudgel as did the noise terrorists in days of old, but as a multi-faceted instrument of torture, intended to break you in a variety of ways; this is creative stuff.
Joe Hatt: I wouldn’t say that bands like us form noise into something more creative as I still think the whole No Wave movement is one of the richest periods of creativity, but I do agree that we harness it in different ways. There are still plenty of ‘true’ noise artists making statements through sheer abrasiveness and don’t care about it being in any way accessible/enjoyable, but we enjoy the tease of lulling people in and then attacking them with feedback and sheets of noise. To be honest I don’t think anyone has done that as well as Sonic Youth, and probably never will.
Well not until now, maybe. Just listen to the looping attack of “Mirror” as it scratches out your heart and it is difficult to imagine even the most committed Youth enthusiast not nodding in appreciation. This really is a monster of a song, searing and penetrating before it passes away abruptly after three minutes with Joe Hatt’s dark vocals echoing in your brain, “Soon this concrete running through my veins will set and leave me in stone.” The lyrics throughout are unremittingly dark and were the last part of the album to be recorded.
Photo by Guy Christie for Isolation
Joe: The rest of the band genuinely didn’t see or really hear the lyrics until the album came out due to our writing process. That involves me recording the music on a phone at practice and then playing the songs on repeat in my headphones and writing to them. It definitely wasn’t a conscious decision for the album to have a theme running through it, it is just what came naturally due to scenarios happening around me at the time. My mum asked me if I needed counselling when she read the lyrics, I just told her it was all fiction … ha ha! I think this band is a psychiatrist’s chair for all four of us.
Unsurprisingly, given the craft involved in shaping these songs with their painstakingly interwoven layers of sound, Spectres are not prolific writers, yet when they have discovered something they like they embrace it, nurture it, and guide it to maturity. These songs matter. Dying is not the pick of the crop, it’s the band heart, body and soul, with nothing spare.
Andy: Our songwriting process is a slow one as we only rehearse once a week for about three hours. It usually involves the four of us staring at the floor playing different things and then somebody will come up with something that we all like. We then piece together the song and get a structure from that idea which can take several weeks. When we recorded Dying we only had those ten songs; we aren’t the sort of band who will write and record twenty and then choose the best ten or twelve.
Such intensity not only explains the unwavering quality of this collection but also sets the warning bells ringing. Spectres’ music has grown ever more ferocious over the past couple of years, so how far are the band able to take it? Is it even possible to better the warped fury of “Lump” or the creeping threat of “Blood In The Cups”? If Spectres look to outdo themselves every time they enter the studio, things could easily end very messily.
Andy: I think that is a reaction to what is going on around us and how we have grown as a band. We never say this needs to sounds like this or we have to make this bit sound horrible, it all comes naturally and the four of us all bring our own experiences from the outside world into the practice room.
Joe: I don’t think we’d ever spend enough time in the studio for us to want to kill each other, which is maybe something we should address. The album was recorded in five days as we just do live takes and then the odd extra track but for the next one I think we’re going to try and do the whole clichéd ‘hire a cottage in the country’ and write for a week, away from the internet and ban ourselves from our phones etc… and see what happens. Hopefully something terrible.
As the band continue to promote Dying, they will be appearing at a few summer festivals in the UK and Europe including Incubate, La Route Du Rock, Supernormal and Reverence. These will be followed by a European tour in September and a short UK tour in November of places they haven’t yet managed to reach. If you haven’t caught Spectres playing live, then make sure you do so, as watching them is something you will never forget. That may be because of your mad dash for the door, the consequent purchase of your first hearing aid, or just the thrill of seeing these consummate musicians create such stunningly addictive patterns of sound.
Photo by Guy Christie for Isolation
Andy: People can take our live show however they like. We appreciate fans who enjoy our music as much as people who can’t stand it. If it makes someone smile then that’s great, whether that be in a disturbed way or if they genuinely like it. We do like people appreciating what we are trying to create and there will be people who like the darkness and the ear battering. We also smile when someone leaves a show because they can’t handle it or have a look on their face whereby they don’t know what to do with themselves. We want people to pay full attention to what we are doing and not be distracted by anything else around them.
It’s difficult to imagine anyone being distracted when Spectres are playing, even by World War Three. Just put the album on and see for yourself. Dying is great; everyone should try it.
Adam Hammond is the head of Isolation in Sussex, once a small record label and now an independent music website and gig promoter. www.isolationrecords.co.uk
We have a great new playlist of Shoegaze, Dream Pop and Noise bands for your listening pleasure. This time around, the selections have been suggested entirely by our very own Shoegaze aficionado and Step On writer Phil Locke!
On this playlist you’ll find The Lees of Memory, SPC ECO, Hot Glass, The History of Colour TV, We Need Secrets, Hammock, Crimsonettes, I Am Your Captain, Tokyo Shoegazer, and Slowness.
A fresh list of some of the finest Shoegaze, Dream Pop, Nugaze and Noise curated from SoundCloud. Part 9 features some truly incredible finds including Bad Apes, Drape, Lush Purr, Afraid of Stairs, The Bilinda Butchers, Young Lovers, Lights That Change, 17years, Cochlear Kill, and Neon Comet.
A big thanks to all of you that listen, like and share the playlists!
Back again with another playlist chock full of some of the finest Shoegaze, Dream Pop, Nugaze, and Noise found on SoundCloud. This list features Secret Shine, Snow In Mexico, Echodrone, Crisis Arm, Woodsman, Witness 9, Strata Florida, Mermaids, Hexagrams, White Glow, and My Invisible Friend. So sit back, let it play and enjoy! If you like what you hear, please share and follow the artists on SoundCloud and Facebook. Comments are also welcome.
Nothing at Adelaide Hall. Toronto. Photo: Dave MacIntyre
The ongoing search for the best of the best Shoegaze, Nugaze, Dream Pop and Noise bands continues with Step On Magazine’s 7th playlist of the series. Some of these bands have been mentioned and highlighted in past articles (and will surely be mentioned again), and some are newly discovered. . Listen, enjoy, and follow the bands on SoundCloud and Facebook!
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