Tee Pee Tuesday: The Warlocks
Shoegazing is back, But this time you don’t need to sneer… Click here for previous Tracks Of The Day.
The Warlocks was the original name of The Grateful Dead. This isn’t them.
This lot are from LA, are ten years, 5 albums and several thousand members old and – like everyone it seems – are the new face of shoegaze.
Yup. Shoegazing is back. Even The Times says so. But this time it’s catching: It’s blank vocals and feedback trails and hypnotic rhythms aren’t just the property of a new breed of indie rockers, but swirling within the smoke clouds of stoner rock too. Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound, Quest For Fire – in fact, probably half of the bands we’ve celebrated in these Tee Pee Tuesdays – have a definite whiff of ‘the gaze’ about them. And the thing is that it’s not such a bad thing: they might not want to admit it, but the early shoegaze stuff (My Bloody Valentine, Ride’s Dreams Burn Down, Swervedriver etc) were the 80s/90s equivalent of prog – or at the very least space rock – a trippy, experimental music where the studio was an instrument and song structures were there to be destroyed.
(I passed on The Time article to our Reviews Editor Ian Fortnam, a former NME staffer. He replied: “Between you, me and the gatepost, if the NME’s features and reviews eds hadn’t been shagging them out of Lush, [shoegazing] would have died on its skinny student arse months before it did… But the TeePee boys have taken the same idea that the Jesus And Mary Chain and MBV took from the Sister Ray Velvets and Space Ritual Hawkwinds and reattached its bollocks…”)
So there you go. The Warlocks: it’s shoegazing with balls, rock music with the bends, and everybody’s doing it.
Download The Warlocks’ The Midnight Sun here.
Read more about the Warlocks here.
And an interview about peeing, here.
