Shoegaze Roundup: Shojo Winter, F ingers, and Helen

Apparently what is hot in shoegaze right now is piles and piles of cavernous reverb.

That’s what I’m taking away from these three new-ish, shoegazey releases from F ingers (yes the space is intentional), Helen, and Shojo Winter.

I’ll admit that in 2015, and maybe even last year, I found myself listening to less and less shoegaze, or ‘gaze inspired music, just because it was so uninteresting at the time. These records, I felt, were at least interesting enough for me to spend the time to write up some nice-ish words about them.

Shojo Winter is a side project of members of Anhednoic favorite Crisis Arm. Their charming four-song debut, Eternal Snow, manages to roll dream pop, shoegaze, and heavy, heavy post-punk vibes into one auspicious package. While in their day job with Crisis Arm, Patrick Capinding and Kevin McVey favor a murky, mysterious mix, for the band’s sound; with Shojo Winter, there’s still the intentional murk, but the instruments are all very discernable, including some impressive chugging bass lines, specifically on frenetic “Slow Reach.”

Part of the charm of Eternal Snow, aside from the total throwback sound, is just how intentionally lo-fi this is. The tape hiss travels from song to song, and it sounds like the whole thing could have been recorded on somebody’s Walkman.

Shoegaze is not usually associated with the word “fun,” but even in the murky waters of Eternal Winter, Shojo Winter are never ominous or threatening. It’s hazy, swooning, and dead on to the sound that it is so achingly nostalgia for.

However, if you are looking for something ominous and threatening, please, look no further than the latest effort from Australia’s F ingers, Hide Before Dinner—it is as unsettling, if not more, as the cover art leads you to believe.

Hide Before Dinner creeps along in a way that makes it the near perfect soundtrack for an unending nightmare—specifically looking at the glitchy, unnerving “Tantrum Time,” which is just five minutes of guitar pedal fuckery, noises, and manipulated vocal samples from singer Carla dal Forno.

Not every song is horrifying on the ears, or as meandering. “Blisfull Cubby House” strums along with an actual rhythm, as does the title track. The opening song, the menacing “Escape Into The Bushes” tries, but the erratic distorted bursts detract from the forward moving momentum of the song.

As you may expect from an album with such cover art, and with songs that sound like bad dreams that you cannot wake from—this is obviously an acquired listen, and is not for the faint of heart. And even for the most dedicated listener or shoegaze aficionado, it can be an exercise in patience, as F ingers are more about making loose sounding experiments rather than “songs.” By the time you’ve reached the volume dipping, mostly reversed sounding  “Under The House Hard to Breathe,” your tolerance for this amalgamation (witch house, shoegaze, doom, lo fi, et. al) may have taken its toll on you.

Scalling back the ominous tone, turning up the reverb, and amplifying both the “dream” and “pop” in “dream pop,” Liz Harris’ new project, Helen, makes its debut with the swirling, cascading, dizzying The Original Faces.

Harris is best known for her ambient, atmospheric solo project Grouper—here she maintains the atmosphere (her voice is buried under an obscene amount of echo) but sheds the ambience for a rhythm section (!) crafting a sound that could only be described as a shoegaze aesthetic applied to a girl group/garage rock style (think early Best Coast.)

Even with the mysterious aspects of the album—just what on earth is she singing?—The Original Faces is a fun record, rollicking through upbeat pop songs like “Allison,” and “Grace,” or the driving tenacity of “Felt This Way” or “Dying All The Time.”

Production wise, it’s another ramshackle, lo-fi affair; the guitars are crunchy and bleed together, the drums and bass are mixed in low, and the vocals are sandwiched in between, rolling off multi-tracked echoes of one another. It’s an impressive and labored over sound for how shitty and homemade it’s supposed to come off as.

As Grouper, there was always a shroud of the enigmatic surrounding Harris. With Helen, she’s not out in the open, but there’s a little bit of light shining through.

Hide Before Dinner is out now via Blackest Ever Black. 
The Original Faces is out now via Kranky.
Eternal Winter is out now via Rok Lok.