Chasing Fridays: Geordie Greep, Starflyer 59, Tanukichan, and more

Hello and welcome back to another edition of Chasing Fridays — my weekly roundup of music criticism and (sometimes) gig reviews. This week, I wrote about four selections of music: A new single from a highly regarded musician who I strongly dislike, a couple fresh shoegaze singles (one great, one just OK), and a "comeback" album, of sorts, by one of the greatest bands in shoegaze history. Check it out below. But first...

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Geordie Greep - "Holy, Holy"

Black Midi broke up earlier this month and their guitarist-vocalist, Geordie Greep, has already started rolling out his first solo album. "Holy, Holy" is the lead single, and I fucking hate it. I don't like Black Midi but I respect them. They played their instruments better than most bands and made rock music that was genuinely innovative, even if I couldn't stand listening to it for more than a song. I find most everything about Greep's schtick (his brash confidence, his Jim Carey facial expressions, his prickly humor) amusing except for his music. I think his music is unbearable, especially this schlocky sack of ramblings from an off-key windbag who sounds like the Warner Bros. frog singing Pere Ubu at karaoke.

I saw someone on Twitter posit that this song was like "if Steely Dan was fronted by Dan Bejar." Yes, correct. It does sound fucking awful. Steely Dan are dogshit uncle music who've been post-ironically embraced by zillennials in the same way Limp Bizkit have. Aja is hambone novelty chum that should only be used to test the positioning of a new pair of living room speakers and then chucked into the trash alongside the silica gel packets. Dan Bejar's voice reminds me why I quit drinking (the headaches). "Holy, Holy" is a long tale about a narcisistic jet-setter who's preparing to proposition a lady of the evening at a local bar. On numerous occasions, Greep sings the words, "your pussy is holy." It's unpleasant.

Aside from simply sounding bad, I just think it's impossible to recreate the late-70s sleaze of Steely Dan in 2024. There's an aching desperation in how much this music wants to sound like an earlier, Finer, Richer, More Adult era of music. Yes, I get that one of Greep's eyes is merely winking toward that retro-mantic desire, and that there's a tipsy lightheartedness to how this whole charade is being presented. But his other eye is soberly fixated on mining from a specific period of garish cocktail hour rock. It's all so whimsical and also so deadly pretentious, and however you deign to engage with it, the product still sucks shit. If the gag is, "heh heh, this sounds like cocaine trays, donnit mate?" Then the bit is painfully uninteresting. If the way "Holy, Holy" sounds is intended to be interpreted as 100 percent Genuine Art, well, it blows ass, so...

Tanukichan - "It Gets Easier" (Feat. Wisp)

I liked Tanukichan's 2023 album Gizmo quite a bit, and the L.A. artist's 2018 LP, Sundays, is also a fine slab of fizzy, sun-sick shoegaze that sits somewhere between Soccer Mommy and early Sasami. A variant of late-2010s indie-rock that's already starting to sound like a bygone era — not in a bad way, just in a "damn, the passage of time is fucked up" kind of way. This new single continues the uptempo trip-hop vibes of Gizmo, boasting some truly awesome drumming and layered guitarwork that's more intricate and atmospheric than Tanukichan's usual fare. It's also a duet with breakout shoegaze star Wisp, who sounds more confident and energized on this song than on any of the solo material she's released thus far.

Her breathy intonations during the second verse are light as spiderwebs, but then she diverts from her usual whisper-coos and actually pulls a tuneful falsetto out of her diaphragm, and then sticks around to puff the hook while Tanukichan mutter-sings in the background. This is the best Wisp has ever sounded on a track, and a lot of that has to do with the simple contrast between her drowsy vocals and the upbeat instrumental below. It's wild how much more colorful and defined her voice sounds when it's not being buried under blankets of plodding Whirr-gaze. I think a song like "It Gets Easier" suits her much better, and I'm very curious to see if this is a sign of what's to come for Wisp.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water - "ana orint" (Feat. Sword II)

I've not been shy about my admiration for TAGABOW, who are, as I've written in as many words before, the most influential and important shoegaze band of the 2020s. I think the loosies collection they dropped on streaming earlier this summer is fucking amazing, but I think this new track with Atlanta's Sword II is just fine. TAGABOW and Sword II are cliqued up and clearly have a lot of mutual admiration for one another, but from my vantage point, the latter wouldn't exist without the former, and "ana orint" sounds like TAGABOW working with a funhouse mirror reflection of themselves.

I'm not sure who contributes what to this track, but the plunky first half sounds like one of Alex G's many leaks from the mid-2010s, and doesn't feel up to TAGABOW's own radical standards. It's only after the "Sicko Mode"-tier beat switch that "ana orint" becomes certifiably dope, as clip-inducing shoegaze guitar fills the mix like wet cement, and TAGABOW singer Doug Dulgarian's wordless vocal melody dances in the periphery like a cat sneakily crawling across your TV stand. However, the ecstatic beauty only lasts for about 30 seconds before a flickering loop of reversed sound lulls the track to sleep. I just wish it stayed awake a bit longer.

Starflyer 59 - Lust for Gold

Starflyer 59's first three albums, Silver (1994), Gold (1995), and Americana (1997), are three of the greatest albums in the American shoegaze canon. Silver and Gold, in particular, are pummeling, bottom-heavy, yet remarkably tuneful records that still sound 20 years ahead of their time. Nothing's first two records, 2014's Guilty of Everything and 2016's Tired of Tomorrow, are directly informed by the classic Starflyer 59 sound, which sanded down the rougher edges of Swervedriver, tossed in some hard-rock twang, and codified a distinctly North American variant of what was then a definitively U.K. genre. After Americana, Starflyer mastermind Jason Martin dropped nearly all the shoegaze qualities of his band and spent the last two decades bouncing between various other types of indie-rock.

On the not-so-subtley titled Lust for Gold, Martin returns to the sound that launched his band, picking up almost exactly where he left off on Americana and delivering a timeless collection of country-tinged shoegaze that's even more relevant now than it was the first time around. The biggest difference between Gold and Lust for Gold is that Martin's husky, David Berman-esque voice is the star of the show here, not his temple-pounding guitars. The waves of phaser-dazed distortion on "909" and "My Lungs" still sound fucking massive, but the emphasis is on songcraft rather than six-string fireworks displays.

It doesn't provide quite the same highs as early Starflyer works, but the quality of the songwriting makes up for that. At a time when almost every local shoegaze band is trying to bite off the sound that Starflyer 59 first perfected, it's really satisfying to hear them return and remind us that it's not about the size of your pedalboard or even the chunkiness of your riffs. It's about writing great songs. Starflyer 59, even all these years later, still write great songs. Study up, grunge-gazers.