Stop looking down bro
Yes, this is a legitimate genre of music and there is a reason it’s named this way. Shoegaze was actually a derogatory term coined by the British music press to refer to post-psychedelic bands whose guitarists had so many effect pedals that they had to literally gaze at their shoes in order to navigate through all their different stompboxes. Naturally, this meant that Shoegaze bands had zero stage presence, hence the staticness that was often ridiculed by critics at the time.
A wall of sound, and lots and LOTS of guitars
Remember Dream Pop? Shoegaze is essentially an extreme version of Dream Pop where the spaciousness is instead occupied by a wall of heavy guitar distortion. If Dream Pop makes you float into the ether, Shoegaze drowns you in a whirlpool of feedback. Breathy vocals remain a constant in achieving the desired effect, but instead of dreamy we’re talking new levels of trippy. So what's the guitarist’s formula to create this wall of sound? The answer is threefold: Drive, Reverb (ideally reverse reverb), and the Whammy bar. Run a shitload of distortion into a reverb or delay and adjust the parameters such that your strumming is masked and it sounds like one long extended chord. Then, grab onto your tremolo bar as you strum and bend the pitch of the entire chord by applying pressure wherever necessary. This is known as the “glide” technique, pioneered by Kevin Shields in the late 1980s with his seminal band My Bloody Valentine.
Who needs the minor pentatonic?
The average budding guitarist reaches a stalemate in their journey, eventually coming to the epiphany that John Mayer is the greatest human being of all-time. They spend countless hours researching and studying the Blues, drilling themselves with pentatonic shapes and listening to Where The Light Is for the umpteenth time. Some of them go their whole lives without ever exploring the wonderful world of alternative guitar music, music that is so anti-blues it's almost blasphemous. If this sounds like you, then this playlist is your chance to break free from the shackles of the blues scale. Reject the roots and embrace the weirdly beautiful world of noise. All you need is some gain. And earplugs.
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