Continued from Shoegaze and dream pop in New Zealand

By the early 2000s, shoegaze felt like a flash in the pan, although My Bloody Valentine (MBV) remained influential. Tristan Dingemans from psychedelic/post-rock group High Dependency Unit (HDU) said that hearing My Bloody Valentine was one of the things that initially inspired him to make music, while Andrew Wilson of Die! Die! Die! cited them as a key influence for his first group, Carriage H.

 

There were hints of shoegaze on the first album Infinity Land (2005) by Christchurch group Shocking Pinks – the guitars sounded warped and the vocals were often indecipherable beneath them. Singer Nick Harte was also a drummer and he often pushed the beats to the fore. They increasingly embraced the dancey, post-punk side of their sound and were signed to LCD Soundsystem’s label, DFA.

 

The notoriety of My Bloody Valentine got a boost when lead songwriter Kevin Shields created the soundtrack for the 2003 movie Lost In Translation. The band eventually re-formed in 2007 and finally released an album that he had been working on since 1996. The shoegaze sound gradually began bubbling up again in New Zealand.

Over The Atlantic perform in the US.

Wellington group Over The Atlantic were such big fans that on their 2006 album Junica they named a song ‘Kevin Shields’. Nik Brinkman wasn’t originally intending to move in this direction, but found it was the perfect fit for the music he was writing.

 

“I was listening to a lot of Bailterspace at that time and I was recording a lot of demos that had a real loud wall of sound to them. I met Bevan Smith and he had a huge knowledge of shoegaze and a big love for bands like My Bloody Valentine. He was interested in creating these kinds of guitar sounds, using weird early 2000s plugins to make these twisted digital distortions. I was borrowing Bevan’s 1990s Memory Man pedal a lot – which had a really nostalgic shoegaze melodic feel to it when mixed with distortion – and ended up using that a lot for Over The Atlantic. I think we both just had a big love for melodic, atmospheric and melancholic 90s music, so it naturally made sense for us to make music like that when we got together.”

Over The Atlantic - Nik Brinkman and Bevan Smith. - Photo By Sean Aiken

For Bevan Smith, the idea of drawing from shoegaze was an extension of his interest in creating unique sound textures, as shown by his electronic work as Signer and Aspen.

“A lot of the music I’m drawn to – like shoegaze – emphasises texture, atmosphere and otherworldliness. Nik and I messed around a lot with plugins and DI’ing the guitars on Junica. That massive sound on ‘France’ is a cool chain of plugins that was just randomly put together. It felt like we were breaking a lot of ‘indie rock’ rules.”

The Golden Awesome

A few years later, a new Wellington shoegaze group emerged called The Golden Awesome. Many of the members were Dunedin émigrés. A key member was Jo Contag, who recalls that he and his bandmates spent their youth in the 90s listening to My Bloody Valentine, but it seemed like shoegaze was an “impenetrable cool UK style” that bands in New Zealand couldn’t adopt without seeming derivative. The Loveless album continued to be a favourite during late-night listening sessions.

“As late-night party music, Loveless offers this exhilarating sense of immersiveness,” says Contag, “the music being very organic and alive (the pumping dynamics, the breathy sensual vocals) as well as having this sculpted vastness with its dense slabs of fuzz. The term ‘visceral’ is awfully overused but fits quite well here. A lot of recent shoegaze uses various approaches to reverb and delay to achieve this kind of vastness, but Loveless isn’t actually that reverby. The way that I hear it, it’s more of an extreme approach to EQing, using very specific types of fuzz/distortion/overdrive, lots of pitch bending, plus a lot of oddly pitched samples (and not actually that many guitar overdubs).”

 

Contag and his friends realised that they could do their own take on this sound by taking a similar approach. “The basis of the Golden Awesome’s sound is the guitar going through several mid-scooped overdriven/fuzzed-out amps with only a bit of chorus and delay, the bass acting like a lower-pitched distorted guitar, the vocals indistinct, harmonious and breathy, the stereo field very wide but also very close. As with MBV, the drums aren’t too thunderous so that the layers of fuzz become comparatively larger. We never specifically investigated the gear or pedal combos used by MBV or anyone else, it was more a case of trial and error (plus plenty of prior band and recording experience) to find a sound that did it for us.”

She's So Rad - Photo by Georgia Schofield

One of the most surprising musicians to take up the sound was Jeremy Toy, who’d come up playing hardcore punk (in Sommerset), then jazz, then club music as a member of Opensouls. It was during the mixing of the Opensouls record, 2010’s Standing In The Rain, that Toy was introduced to Slowdive by David Cooley, the LA-based sound engineer he was working with. The pair had long discussions about how the guitars had been recorded on Slowdive’s ‘Souvlaki Space Station’ and Toy was driven to experiment with the same effects units, the Yamaha SPX90 and the Alesis Midiverb II. He took this knowledge into a new project with his partner, Anji Toy (née Sami), which they called She’s So Rad.

 

Anji found that having the vocals low in the mix could be surprisingly freeing for a songwriter. “With the loud guitars, you’re able to disguise your expression in a way. On lots of my songs I feel overly cheesy expressing myself because I’m uncomfortable with emotions. Another thing is that the shoegaze sound hasn’t really aged – unlike 90s rock, for example, where the production and the drum sound really dates it.”

Tamaryn Brown, New Zealand born singer-songwriter of US-based group Tamaryn.

During the 2010s, more of the original UK acts began to tour once more, with both Ride and Slowdive both repeatedly visiting our shores. When Lush reformed for a North American tour, they took California-based group Tamaryn as their support act. The lead singer-songwriter of the group was Tamaryn Brown, who was born in New Zealand and lived here until her family moved to Washington when she was seven years old. 

Tamaryn signed with respected US indie label Mexican Summer and soon found comparisons to earlier bands like My Bloody Valentine, though she told Vice that she didn’t mind the comparison. “I would never deny there are elements of shoegaze,” she says. “There are.” 

 

Back home, the number of bands drawing on the shoegaze sound seemed to gradually multiply, especially in Auckland which spawned acts such as Bespin and Dead Little Penny. Guitarist Rikki Sutton had a run of groups in this space, including his first band Space Ventura, short-lived outfit Eyes No Eyes, and his ongoing project, Couchmaster. Sutton finds it hard to pinpoint what kept drawing him back towards shoegaze.

“I’m not entirely sure what it is,” says Sutton, “something about thick walls of sound, rolling modulating reverb, juicy fuzz, really soothes my ADHD addled brain, it can be meditative and also sonically really complex, for me it’s really trancey. I can’t escape it, but I did grow up listening to The Cure a lot.”

 

Sutton took an interesting sidestep when he joined Water with Vince Nairn and Oscar Davies-Key, former members of legendary indie/punk group Rackets. Their beautiful track ‘Melt’ became one of the finest slices of shoegaze during this era, though it wasn’t an intentional move.

“With Water we always tried to be as collaborative as possible,” says Sutton. “Almost everything was written in the practice room with everyone playing along trying things out. I tried to make a conscious effort to get out of my usual space and play more like I was in a country band (or my messed up idea of what that sounds like). I think ‘Melt’ was Vince’s chord progression, but you can definitely hear me slipping into my comfort zone laying sludge over top.”

At the noisier end of the spectrum was Erase Everything, a new group fronted by Angelo Munro from The Bleeders, which showed just how far the influence of shoegaze had begun to reach.

Dream Pop becomes a thing

The term “dream pop” had never applied to a movement of bands in the same way that shoegaze had been. Instead, it was a handy shorthand that collected similar sounding acts together, often retrospectively. Surprisingly, the description proved to be more useful over time as successive new acts took a similar approach – rather than reaching for an anthemic chorus, they kept the vocals at a whisper or added layers of reverb, so the singing was at the same level as the instruments as a part of the overall atmosphere rather than a clear focal point.

Purple Pilgrims, 2017: Valentine Nixon, left, and Clementine Nixon. - Publicity photo

The US group Beach House was particularly influential. Their members directly cited earlier artists such as Cocteau Twins and Mazzy Star. This dreamlike approach can also be heard in local acts such as Womb and Purple Pilgrims (now Clementine Valentine).

 

Several of the New Zealand acts that gained a sizable worldwide audience were repeatedly described as dream pop. The term was certainly applied to one of New Zealand’s biggest streamers, Salvia Palth; songwriter Daniel Johann recorded his breakthrough 2013 album Melanchole when he was 15 years old, so it was hardly surprising that it had a tender aspect to it. When he finally returned in 2024 with a follow-up, Last Chance to See, the ranking website Album of the Year listed it as one of the best dream pop albums of the year.

 

Yumi Zouma also found an impressive international audience and toured overseas regularly. Their guitarist Charlie Ryder explained to the Luna Collective website that dream pop is just one aspect of their sound: “A lot of influence we have is from that sort of area of the music world, like shoegaze, dream pop, indie/alternative, pop, etc. But we don’t really think about it, to be honest. The songs sort of just take [on] a life of their own in the sense that one of us might start off trying to write a song that’s a dream pop song but by the end of it … the songs end up being what they want to be. They’re always completely different [compared] to how they started.”

Yumi Zouma - Olivia Campion, Charlie Ryder, Josh Burgess, Christie Simpson.

The shoegaze aspect of Yumi Zouma can most clearly be heard on their cover of ‘She’s Electric’ by Oasis, in which cloudy guitars build in layers throughout the song.

 

Fazerdaze is another viral hit act tagged as dream pop from the start. The comparisons came as a surprise to songwriter Amelia Murray.

“I mostly just listened to The Beatles and then I suppose Smashing Pumpkins when I was an angsty teen. I tried to make classic rock and it didn’t work so I veered this way. I only really got into shoegaze after I started this project and people recommended bands to me! I identify with ‘dream pop’ more so. My voice is very limited so this kind of music I make was really only a default.”

Fazerdaze supporting Lorde in 2013. - Charlotte Bruin

Amelia Murray’s teenage listening may still contain traces of shoegaze. Billy Corgan was such a fan of My Bloody Valentine that he got Alan Moulder – the same engineer who worked on Loveless – to mix their 1993 album Siamese Dream. Whatever the case, Murray’s two albums Morningside (2017) and Soft Power (2024) are referred to as dream pop in almost every review, so fortunately it’s a term she is willing to embrace.

 

The fluidity of the “dream pop” tag will no doubt have some of those reading this article thinking that it’s just another annoying box created by music journalists to tidily sort musical acts into categories and there may be some truth to that. Bu it’s still nice to see how a line can be drawn between The Stereo Bus and Fazerdaze or how the shoegaze approach has inspired so many local bands over the early decades of the 21st century.

Springloader on the header of the "Shoegaze Dream Pop and Nugaze" Facebook group, 2024.

Springloader, the shoegazey dream pop band started by Rob Mayes in 1993, returned with a new album in 2024 and found themselves given pride of place as the header image on the main Facebook group for this style of music (the Shoegaze, Dream Pop & Nugaze group). Time may have passed, there’s still clearly an audience for ethereal guitar music, whether you can hear the lyrics or not.

 

 

--