Chasing Fridays: Computerwife, Closedown, Hooky live, more
Reviews of shoegaze of all kinds -- new, old, and live.
Hello hello, welcome back to Chasing Fridays, my weekly roundup of music criticism and (sometimes) (this time!) gig reviews. I was supposed to see This Is Lorelei this week, but since Pittsburgh is municipally incapable of functioning during extended snowfall, meaning none of the roads in my neighborhood, let alone the urban mountains we'd have to scale to get to the venue, were plowed, I made the executive decision to turn the car around after 20 minutes of stalling out and spinning wheels around the corner from my house. Sad, but out of my hands. I'll see This Is Lorelei next time.
A few days later, I did manage to catch Her New Knife, Hooky, and Melaina Kol at a house show in Pittsburgh's college ghetto, Oakland. It was my first Oakland house show post-COVID lockdown, and I wrote about how that felt below. I also wrote about some great new music on a benefit comp for L.A. fire relief, reviewed a fresh shoegaze split from two bands I'd never heard, and went long on the little-known 1994 debut by first-wave L.A. shoegazers Closedown. It's the latest entry in my new-to-2025 commitment to writing about one older album during each Chasing Fridays installment, and I think it's my best writeup in that series yet.
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Various Artists - 2025 LA Fire Relief Comp
Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 14, 2025
I'm not going to put on my critic's cap while reviewing the music on a benefit comp lol. The proceeds for this bundle are obviously going to an urgent cause, and the songs– by They Are Gutting a Body of Water, shower curtain, Computerwife, and others – are an added bonus for your charitable efforts. Below, are my favorite moments, ordered roughly sequentially with the tracklist.
- Bedridden named their scuzzy shoegaze contribution "Song 3." Funny title.
- Computerwife's 2023 album feels a little bit lost to time, no? I realize it's only been two years, but I feel like I heard no one talk about the New York artist in 2024, despite putting out one of the better sounds-like-Philly-but-not-from-Philly albums this side of Feeble Little Horse's Hayday. "Avoid 2" is a great reminder that Computerwife's creepy bedrotting-pop songs are the shit.
- Deer Pond sounds like a band I would've seen play with Bilge Rat in Doug from TAGABOW's attic venue in 2016. Slowcore with just a tinge of emo melancholia.
- So, there's a song on here attributed to two artists, Fasting and shower curtain, and the song is titled "Not W/ shower curtain." My gut is telling me that this actually is with shower curtain, and I'm telling you to listen immediately because this ramshackle hunk of non-linear shoegaze is fucking awesome and weird in the best ways.
- Fieldy and Scott Hale, two artists I've never heard of, teamed up for a song called "Plan." It founds like if early Four Tet was channeled through the mind of a Julia's War deep cut like Acid Freek. Dope as fuck.
- God of War, Hooky, and TAGABOW – the triptych of Philly-gaze beatmakers – joined forces for a heater. For as much as I've written about how this clique of artists are translating shoegaze through a modern musical dialect, I could easily write another couple thousand words about how they're reformatting trip-hop and other sub-genres of IDM (styles that emerged just after or adjacent to shoegaze in the early 90s) for the age of lo-fi brainrot. This song is beautiful and whimsical.
- shower curtain's "bedbugs" is such a great song that it even hits hard in crud-coated demo form. I like how the drums clip in this version. Aural novocaine.
- Just buy the fuckin' comp. It's for a good cause.
Ampule, Linus - Decay Chain split
Bandcamp New & Notable Jan 9, 2022
Chasing Sundays subscriber, Gary, put me onto this split by Wyoming's Ampule and Minneapolis's Linus, two fledgling shoegaze bands who show a lot of promise on their respective sides. Ampule's sound is brooding and abrasive without ever losing the melody. "Sluggernaut" (great name) has the barbed textures of TAGABOW and the drowsy tunefulness of Nothing, and Ampule get extra points for not sounding like they're aping either band's exact guitar rigs. Linus are basically a Nineties post-hardcore band sheathed in shoegaze. "Laramie" restlessly seethes and simmers like an Unwound song, dragging its corpse across the floor with a slowcore gait and then springing to its feet to wreck the room with destructive shoegaze gales. The vocals in "Pumpkin" are mixed so low that they're practically inaudible, and when the guitars intermittently drop out to reveal a bare-naked rhythm section, the tension makes my arm hairs stand upright. Shoegaze that's aggressive and interesting? Rarer than you might think.
Hooky, Her New Knife, Melaina Kol live @ Hammer House
Oakland is the college neighborhood in Pittsburgh where the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Melon are located, therefore making it a hotspot for DIY venues. I hadn't been to a show in Oakland since pre-COVID, meaning I'm several generations removed from the house show ecosystem that Hammer House operates within. It felt both natural and surreal to be back in that cramped environment. The basement was nearly at capacity by the time I showed up shortly after doors, but despite the 100-ish bodies in the room at its peak, it never warmed up enough to make me regret wearing my coat. My feet were numb from the frigid concrete after the first 10 minutes, and I could barely see anything the whole time. The room was pitch dark and the ceilings low, making it challenging to make out the faces of those standing right next to me, and ensuring I would barely get a glimpse of the stage area until the very end of the night when it had cleared out.
I watched Melaina Kol's performance while standing perpendicular to the crowd in the back of the room, squinting at a small TV screen that was broadcasting a camcorder stream of the set. One of the three Julia's War signees filling out the bill, Melaina Kol's droney, largely instrumental slow-gaze sounded remarkably dense and pleasurable seeping through the impenetrable blob of dazed onlookers. I managed to get a little closer for Her New Knife, but still experienced their discordant thrum in a purely auditory manner, my eyes cast downward into the abyss of concrete and beer residue. The normies next to me slurping Four Lokos and loudly debating whether they should start moshing seemed to be genuinely into Her New Knife. That band are on to something.
Hooky were last, and I was most excited for them since I had never caught them live before. By the start of their set, half of the crowd had filtered out, so I could get close enough to occasionally see one of their members wander into frame. The Philly two-piece are on a wild tip right now, pulling chillwave, bedroom-pop, and TAGABOW-style shoegaze under the same hood, and refracting those sounds outward in a way none of their peer bands quite are. Their set was riddled by technical difficulties; busted samplers, broken guitar strings, power cords getting pulled out. Despite the stop-start flow, the music they played warmed my chest cavity and got my toes tapping enough to where I could feel them again. Even at age 30, and despite all the less-than-optimal room configurations, I still felt those flutters of house show magic at least once during each set. Some things never change.
Closedown - Dissolve
When you think of the quintessential American bands in shoegaze's first wave – Medicine, Drop Nineteens, Swirlies, Lilys, Lovesliescrushing – and pick apart their sonic DNA, it doesn't appear that Slowdive had a particularly strong resonance Stateside during the early 90s. Indeed, that predominantly East Coast clutch of bands (Drop Nineteens, Swirlies, Lilys, as well as D.C.'s Velocity Girl and Detroit outliers Majesty Crush, to expand the pool) were more indebted to My Bloody Valentine's jagged squalls of noise, Swervedriver's torched rave-downs, and even Ride's English pop classicism than Slowdive's gem-encrusted caverns of glimmering ambience. The same wasn't true for many shoegaze bands on the American west coast.
In the Arizona "Beautiful Noise" scene, bands like Alison's Halo and Six String Malfunction were picking up on Slowdive's sense of starry-night splendor, fashioning a more ambient form of shoegaze that was less about all-consuming distortion and more about melodic atmosphere. In L.A., Medicine, who were early fans of MBV and relentlessly compared to them in the press, were certainly the biggest shoegaze band in the city – and on the entire coast, for that matter. However, there was another L.A. peer group whose music was so indebted to Slowdive that you almost have to wonder if they even had access to any other shoegaze records beyond Just for a Day and the Morningrise EP.
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Closdeown's 1994 debut, originally called Nearfield, but re-titled as Dissolve for its 2024 reissue via the upstart Painted Air label, is the closest I've heard any first-wave (1990-1994 in America, 1989-1991 in the U.K.) American shoegaze band come to replicating Slowdive's sound. Practically every song moves forward at the honey-dripping tempo of Slowdive's "Machine Gun," and vocalist J. Battle sounds like he studied Neil Halstead's brittle annunciations like he was a cantor reciting religious text. "Bumblebee," a seven-and-a-half minute drifter that orbits its axis at the speed of hovering dust, is buttered with the same oily reverbs that made Slowdive's guitars refract endlessly in their tunnels of whooshing sound. "Red Oval," another seven-minute stretcher, even borrows the dubby basslines Slowdive pulled into shoegaze on Souvlaki, adding their own, slightly irritating, majorly cool flair with a reverse reverb sound that shrieks like a firework ripping through the night sky.
While many U.K. gazers were unfairly characterized as pound-for-pound ripoffs of My Bloody Valentine or Ride despite having their own subtle flairs, it's hard to make a case that Closedown were anything other than unabashed Slowdive disciples. And they're not hiding their admiration, having hired 'Dive drummer Simon Scott to remaster Dissolve for its reissue. The biggest difference is that Closedown relied on keyboards to conjure some of the glistening timbres that Slowdive pulled solely out of their Jazzmasters. Also, even with Scott's handiwork, Dissolve still has a cheaper, more yellowed-paper veneer than the ritzily recorded Slowdive output. The slightly lower fidelity gives Dissolve its own distinguishing character, even if the songs are almost comically faithful to the source material.
Slowdive are now correctly recognized as one of the greatest shoegaze bands ever, but in the early 1990s, they absolutely did not have that same cache. Closedown were one of the first bands in the world to recognize that Slowdive's sound was so brilliant, so mesmerizing, so staggeringly beautiful, that they could wholesale rip them off and still produce an album that's worth hearing 30 years onward.