’s music has evolved gradually across two decades of sporadic activity, moving from their abstract drone beginnings toward something resembling actual rock songs. At times, the change seems to have crept up on them. around the release of their second full-length, 2011’s gothic, expansive , the New Orleans duo expressed a note of bafflement about the way the album was landing.
“People have been citing shoegaze a lot in reference to the new album and that actually took us a bit by surprise,” said Turk Dietrich, adding, “We don’t feel any relation in aesthetic, harmonically or sonically, to most of the artists from the early ’90s shoegaze movement.” If Deitrich and his bandmate Mike Jones once struggled to hear the influence of shoegaze on their music, 13 years later, they seem to have come around to the idea. The duo’s third album, , doesn’t necessarily sound influenced by the shoegaze movement as a whole; it sounds inspired principally by shoegaze band, —specifically their landmark 1991 album .
Hit play on the album’s opening track, “Realistic (I’m Still Waiting),” and it’s all there right from the jump: the gauzy, smudged guitar riffs; the androgynous angel sighs; that general sense of warp and weft, as if the track itself was being bent out of shape by a gigantic tremolo arm. Living rent-free in another group’s soundworld is seldom a good look—particularly when it’s as distinctive as the one created. But Dietrich and Jones are seasoned s.