It’s the year’s end and that means the year end best of lists have been out for three months or so now. When it does appear, i’ve seen so often Everything Goes Wrong and the Vivian Girls labeled as Shoegaze. What is wrong with people? Where are they grasping music from? What narrow touchstones do people pass when coming across music, and how do they keep up such myopia? Shoegaze, this is not. And the breadth of things it is, the annals and lineage of music it follows and contributes to, goes neglected. And don’t think the “girls who can actually rock” precept, or they being female and the tokenisation thereof, hasn’t gone by unmentioned. In this end of year! Ugh, people. Music fans.
And this song isn’t even on Everything Goes Wrong. And i don’t even have a physical copy of it! When this song is played live and they draw out that middle section to a frenzied, possessed, compulsive length, becoming something like a mantra, an incantation cast over the whole audience, i become a shitty rock critic spouting embarrassing metaphors. No, but it does reach that trance-like state, and i’d have to be ten times the prude i am not to be swept up in it.
