Blue Smiley - Return

21st century shoegaze bands really haven't appealed to my 80s & 90s soul. I couldn't stand Deerhunter and Atlas Sound. Then there was a glut of groups which were so awful that I can't even recall their names. There was a Welsh group I heard once and liked. I didn't mind Belong and Winona Dryver had an excellent song. Then blackgaze and the whole doom and whatever metal crossed with Shoegaze... just nah... no thanks...nope... and I love me some old school and second wave Black Metal. M83 were sometimes ok whatever their sub-genre was. I've never checked Grouper's Liz Harris in her shoegaze outfit Helen which is weird because i'd probably like them. I didn't understand how Spirit Of The Beehive's consummate throwback to 90s slacker alt-rock & psychedelic grunge got tagged shoegaze but whatever...

So that brings us to Blue Smiley who were contemporaries of Spirit Of The Beehive in Philadelphia during the mid 2010s. Blue Smiley's Return mini album from 2016 is probably the only innovative shoegaze record of the new millennium. They did the impossible and made shoegaze fresh, fun, exciting and unique again. Its got heavy use and abuse of that chorus effect (sorry I'm no gear head, is it chorus?), frantic shimmering jangles, helium cloud synths and ecstatic lawn mowing lead breaks. 

  

If the Pale Saints were fully obsessed with all the fluttery bits of guitaring from rock's history, had the brevity and dexterity of Minutemen and were produced by Scott Cortez it might have sounded like this. This is some of the most buoyant shoegazery put to tape. The sonic shapeshifting's like squishing marshmallows. These fizzy to fuzzy and back again tunes burst into life like fireflies, just a flash and then they're gone.

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Talk about leaving you wanting more, not long after the release of this all too brief album of supreme sherbet bomb shoegaze the band's mastermind Brian Nowell died. He was just 26. The twenty minutes of Return has already proved influential though, inspiring the current crop of groups in Philadelphia including They Are Gutting A Body Of Water, A Country Western and Full Body 2.