For me one of the characteristics at the heart
of the idiom is the spectrum of emotion that gets compressed into great shoegaze
tracks—the ones that erupt with sadness and joy, melancholy and celebration all
at once. This emotional quality is mirrored by sonic juxtapositions in which
blissfully tortured guitars unleash great waves of noise with pretty, gently
enunciated vocal melodies afloat among them. Classic bands of the genre like
Medicine, My Bloody Valentine, and Slowdive have all excelled at this.
On Hierarchy, Lightfoils pull it off too, offering
their own fully realized, sorrowful-transcendant-triumphant admixture of these essential
sonic and emotional characteristics of shoegaze. Special kudos to Jane Zabeth
whose vocals are deservedly brought a little more forward in the mix than genre
convention might dictate. Her voice traces graceful, swooping arcs over the
music’s haze like the outlines of lofty hills soaring over banks of mist. The
rhythm section of Cory
Osborne and John Rungger, whom we interviewed last September, brings
impressive prog-level chops and some of that kind of ideation to the
underpinnings of the songs. Guitarists Zeeshan Abbasi and Neil Yodnane are
responsible for the gales of shoegaze textural assault that hold it all
together.
Here’s the new video for Diastolic, the fourth
track on Hierarchy.
—Dan
