FAZERDAZE AT THE GASOMETER, MELBOURNE (PHOTO: Chelsea Sienna)
FAZERDAZE AT THE GASOMETER, MELBOURNE (PHOTO: Chelsea Sienna)

Pop CultureMay 14, 2018

Shoegaze, dream pop and the return of the ethereal side of NZ indie music

FAZERDAZE AT THE GASOMETER, MELBOURNE (PHOTO: Chelsea Sienna)
FAZERDAZE AT THE GASOMETER, MELBOURNE (PHOTO: Chelsea Sienna)

Dream pop is the genre of the moment in the worldwide indie scene and New Zealand is no exception, with acts like Fazerdaze and Yumi Zouma gaining huge international audiences. Back at home, the associated sound of shoegaze has made a return, with a raft of new bands emerging onto the live scene. Gareth Shute traces their origins and explains why they’re back in the spotlight.

When Fazerdaze released their first EP back in 2014, singer/guitarist Amelia Murray immediately found her music drawing comparisons to a set of bands she’d never heard of. “I wasn’t cool enough to know shoegaze,” she said. “I mostly just listened to The Beatles and then I suppose Smashing Pumpkins when I was an angsty teen. I tried to make classic rock and it didn’t work so I veered this way. I only really got into shoegaze after I started this project and people recommended bands to me! I identify with ‘dream pop’ more so. My voice is very limited so this kind of music I make was really only a default.”

It’s no surprise that these genres weren’t at the forefront of Murray’s mind, since they first flourished nearly 30 years ago. ‘Shoegaze’ goes back to late-’80s/early-‘90s bands like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Lush, Slowdive and Curve, whose live shows had them staring down (shoe-gazing) at an array of guitar effects pedals which often drowned out the soft, reverb-drenched vocals. Meanwhile, ‘dream pop’ is often traced back earlier to the Cocteau Twins in the 1980s, before being applied to later bands like Galaxie 500 and Mazzy Star.

However, there’s always been a connection between the two scenes with bands playing and working together; both genres share a tendency for slow-ish songs with soft, whispery vocals that add to the atmosphere rather than riding over the top of the music.

Shoegaze has come back in the limelight with My Bloody Valentine, Ride and Slowdive all reforming over the past decade (the latter played Laneway in Auckland this year). Meanwhile, the enduring interest in dream pop recently saw Pitchfork naming its 30 best albums in this genre – a list topped by Cocteau Twins, Mazzy Star and Beach House. (Pitchfork had already done a shoegaze ranking in 2016). In his introduction to the list, Dean Wareham explained how he thought the two genres differed: “shoegaze bands are more of an assault, a wall of sound, while there is more empty space in dream pop”. (Wareham, I should note, was born in Wellington, but left for New York with his family when he was 14, where he later formed seminal dream pop band Galaxie 500).

This overseas interest in dream pop has been good timing for Fazerdaze, who ranks among New Zealand’s most streamed acts, alongside Yumi Zouma, who have a slightly more of an electro edge but nonetheless mix whispery vocals and ethereal guitars in a similar manner. In fact, Yumi Zouma display some elements of shoegaze too – especially on their cover of ‘She’s Electric’ on their re-recording of Oasis’ (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?

New dream pop acts are emerging fast in New Zealand. The looseness of the ‘dream pop’ label means it’s been applied to everything from indie acts like Womb, Purple Pilgrims, Blue for Noon, and Salvia Palth to poppier acts like Erith, May Project, and Tsorf, or even a hard-to-categorize musician like Alexa Casino. There’s also a wave of shoegaze-esque bands playing on the Auckland scene, including Bespin, Eyes No Eyes, Water and She’s So Rad. Even dark alt-country group Dead Little Penny have recently moved in this direction – their latest single, ‘Honeycomb,’ layers fuzz-guitar over a drum machine beat to create a sound that’s reminiscent of ‘90s shoegazers Curve.

Of course, there were actually shoegaze bands in New Zealand back around the time it first emerged, many of which were on Christchurch label Failsafe. Of those, The Malchicks were the best-known, but singer/guitarist Matt Dalzell found that capturing the shoegaze sound was not an easy task back then. 

“In the days before websites, clips, and wiring diagrams of various rigs, we just had to apply ears, lateral thinking and budget constraints, and focus on what we wanted to do,” he says. “We spent ages getting the right tunings. There are some double dropped Ds, a Csus4 open tuning, and a D slack-key. That gave us plenty of chime and drone to build the songs around before we ever hit the studio. My main pedal sequence was Dunlop Wah, a phaser which might have been a Korean copy of a Boss, and a Boss Superfeedbacker. That was it. No delays, flangers, vibe or tremolo pedals, no extensive pedalboards … For texture we would often layer an acoustic 12-string under the main guitars. The rest was all in the playing, chord choices, harmonic combinations, and some unexpected time signatures. And, of course, the whammy bar…”

Dalzell notes that Bailter Space and JPSE were similarly influential on the group’s sound, though Flying Nun was always more interested in hazy psych-rock pop than shoegaze or dream pop. By the mid-nineties, The Malchicks had come to an end with band members going overseas, while overseas the UK shoegaze scene was seemingly made irrelevant by the ascent of Britpop (though The Verve did manage the move from whispery psych-rock to pop balladry).

The first hint of the shoegaze revival was when Kevin Shields wrote a much-heralded soundtrack for the movie Lost In Translation – which was fitting since Japan had its own emergent shoegaze scene at the time. Back in New Zealand, The Shocking Pinks toyed with shoegaze on their breakthrough album, Infinity Land (2005), though their deal with DFA would see them push their post-punk, dancey elements to the fore. A few years later, She’s So Rad became one of the first contemporary local acts to adopt the shoegaze/dream pop sound. Singer/guitarist Jeremy Toy was still playing for soul/funk band Open Souls at the time.

“I was mixing the Open Souls record in LA with David Cooley who had produced the Silversun Pickups record,” he says. “I knew about My Bloody Valentine – when I played guitar in Sommerset, the drummer was a huge fan – but I hadn’t heard of Slowdive. David was like, ‘You have to check out Souvlaki Space Station’. It just blew my mind. Then he told me about the entire guitar recording process for Slowdive and that got me into the effects units they had used – the Yamaha SPX90 and the Alesis Midiverb II.”

A small selection of Jeremy Toy_s shoegaze records, including a signed Swervedriver LP from when he loaned them a guitar (PHOTO: SUPPLIED)

Even today, there remains some truth to the idea of shoegaze bands being obsessed by guitar effects, as Jonathan Lee from Auckland band,Bespin explains: “I have waves of kids checking out my pedal boards at the ends of sets and taking pictures. They don’t want to meet me, they just want a pic to study later.”

Lee believes that there are multiple reasons for the shozegaze/dream pop approach of turning down the volume of vocals in the mix. “To me, it’s about trying to represent the feeling of live immersion in a recording. You’re trying to represent large room spaces which is extremely hard to translate to smaller spaces, normal stereos, headphones, and iPhone speakers. Design-wise, if you turn the vocals down, then the instrumentation feels louder in the mix. Also, cinematic and ambient styles of music lend themselves to a meditative immersion; thus de-emphasising the vocal and turning it into more of another instrument in the mix such that the listener continues to project themselves onto and into it.”

Anji Toy (She’s So Rad) also feels that having your vocals buried in the mix can be freeing: “With the loud guitars, you’re able to disguise your expression in a way. Lots of my songs I feel overly cheesy expressing myself because I’m uncomfortable with emotions. Another thing is that the shoegaze sound hasn’t really aged – unlike 90s rock, for example, where the production and the drum sound really dates it.’’

Jeremy Toy, She’s So Rad (photo: Gareth Shute)

But, why now? Is there a parallel between the music scene when shoegaze/dream pop first emerged and the current moment? Think of ‘80s music and you imagine super-catchy pop with crystal clear vocals; meanwhile the indie acts were rebelling with a sound that was the opposite – drawn-out melodies buried in layers of guitar. These days, we seem to be in the midst of the similar pop (and hip-hop) oriented era, with producers taking a maximalist approach to getting listeners to stream their tracks beyond the first 30 seconds. If hip-hop and pop are loud and overwhelming then one response is to go quieter, take the vocals down and push the atmosphere of your songs.

Certainly, it’s working for Fazerdaze. After arriving at the dream pop sound on her own, Amelia Murray has emerged into an international scene primed for her style. Last month she played Coachella and supported Haim in the US, and now she’s in the midst of a European tour. She may sing in a whisper, but she’s being heard across the world.


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Dove Love, a resident of Gloriavale, in the 2018 TVNZ documentary
Dove Love, a resident of Gloriavale, in the 2018 TVNZ documentary

Pop CultureMay 14, 2018

Blessed be the fruit: A return to Gloriavale in a Handmaid’s Tale world

Dove Love, a resident of Gloriavale, in the 2018 TVNZ documentary
Dove Love, a resident of Gloriavale, in the 2018 TVNZ documentary

Angel, Dove, Mercy and the rest of the flock are back, as happy as ever in blue. Writer Anke Richter, a cult observer, watches Gloriavale: The Return.

The best thing I could do to prepare myself for Gloriavale: The Return was to catch up on the latest episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale. It’d be a sort of desensitisation treatment. Nothing, I thought, could come close to the dystopian nightmare-scape of Gilead – even if one takes place in a fictionalised United States and the other shows real life in a cult community only 230 kilometres away from me.

In the Lightbox series based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, the remaining fertile women are brutally enslaved by a fundamentalist Christian regime. The “handmaids” are walking wombs, all dressed in long red robes and barely uttering more than “Blessed be the fruit” from under their chastity hoods. If this doesn’t make you a feminist, then not even seeing genital mutilation up close will. Praised be, bitches.

Maybe watching Elisabeth Moss as pregnant June Osborne – “Offred” is her handmaiden name – fail to escape the horrors of the godly gulag wasn’t such a good idea after all. Some immunisations can give you a bad reaction – or in my case, more emotional cross-contamination than I asked for. And I don’t mean the similar costume designs. But let’s look back at happier, healthier days. Back to July 2016 when the last of a three-part observational documentary series about New Zealand’s largest religious community aired on TV2. Gloriavale: A Woman’s Place was the most popular doco on the network that year.

The last half of the last show was also the cheesiest, creepiest wedding video you would have ever seen, even as the best man or bridesmaid of ecstatic reborn Christians with a fetish for pink. Remember Dove Love, the rosy-cheeked 22-year-old virgin who was about to marry 17-year-old Watchful Steadfast after only talking to him for six weeks, “pure as a gift”? How they walked off the stage during their wedding ceremony to “consummate the marriage” while an elder commented on her “seal” that only the child-groom was allowed to “open”? All the while the narrator telling us in a cheery voice: “Dove does have choices: to be happy or not.” Exactly the same choices that, say, prisoners have.

But don’t call Amnesty International just yet. Let’s instead remember fondly all the lines of clean washing blowing in the West Coast sunshine and pregnant women gliding along in long robes, softly patting their bellies, folding baby clothes and smiling submissively at the men. A peaceful place where birth control is straight from the devil, the outside world is purely evil, marriages are arranged, teenagers expected to get pregnant, women work in the kitchen from a young age and the elders preach that vaccines are made from aborted foetuses. These heavenly indoctrinated creatures could have come straight out of the text book of Aunt Lydia, the Gestapo-like chief ideologist at the “Women Centre” in Gilead where the handmaids are tortured, broken and brainwashed into obedient breeding machines. In red, not blue.

Dove Love holding baby Gracious.

One difference between what we’ve seen of Gilead and of Gloriavale is that in the latter place, everyone always looks cheerful. The fly-on-the-wall footage was taken by independent filmmaker Amanda Evans, who admitted in a 2015 TV Guide interview that she was “quite intimidated” when she first arrived in Gloriavale. Then she gained access and trust. “These days it’s like catching up with friends,” she added.

Fast forward three years, and we’re at Gloriavale: the Return. Now it looks like Evans is not just catching up with old friends but giving them a professional leg up by presenting their shiniest, idealised side to the outside world, for free. That’s called PR or propaganda and is usually paid for by the company, group or institution you are promoting, not by a broadcaster. Cheap side-sweep to Gilead: all the journalists there were massacred.

The Gloriarites hate the media too and have turned camera crews away. The three-part TVNZ series is the only video material they have on their website, apart from an old clip that shows how their leader – a convicted sex offender – miraculously survived a plane crash in 1967. TVNZ has served those elders well. But maybe it has made more people aware of this cult and sympathetic for the gentle people trapped in there.

Since we saw Dove Love in all her sweet innocence, a lot has happened over at Haupiri, and I’m not talking about the Waitangi picnic that the lovely folks there prepared for the residents of Greymouth. More voices about the suffering and suppression of Gloriavale families have surfaced, some of them “offended by the soft treatment TV has afforded the South Island cult”.

Last year, the government released a 33-page report that contains allegations of sexual assault, beatings, psychological pressure, forced isolation and forced marriage, abuse of power, shunning of renegades, withholding of money – all the hallmarks of an oppressive fanatical cult.

The police have since investigated the community, their charitable status is under scrutiny and a Gloriavale man was charged with sexual violation and indecent assault. That may be just the tip of the iceberg, but – spoiler alert – none of this will be mentioned on TVNZ in the weeks to come. (You can see TVNZ’s response to this piece below.) Those who cannot get enough of the happy Gloriavale flock, rejoice: the eight new mini-episodes, about ten minutes long, have exactly the same evangelical feel, tone and gloss as the three longer pieces before. Each zooms in on a certain aspect of daily life: the food preparation, or manufacturing wardrobe for 500 people. “You can even waterslide in it!”, we learn about the practical blue frocks, suddenly finding ourselves in an infomercial – but where’s the phone number to order such amazing outdoor garb?

If it wasn’t so one-sided, Evans’ work could pass as an educational “show and tell” or a good old Country Calendar piece. We see a young woman who spends three years just making butter. So much self-sufficiency and hard work! Think of all the healthy babies popping out soon, thanks to the good dairy! Praise the Lord. I couldn’t help being fascinated in the same sad way that I watched “Offred” doing her chores. And don’t forget: She does have choices – “to be happy or not”.

One of the families at Gloriavale

Nowhere in the first four episodes that I watched does the interviewer or narrator touch on the patriarchal control or any of the controversy that has followed Gloriavale over the last years. Only in a breezy half sentence, after boasting how rapidly the community has grown thanks to the lack of birth control and abortions, do we hear that some “families choose to leave”. No word about how they are pushed out and ostracised, with hardly more than a shirt on their back and no further contact to their families on the inside. Over 70 people so far.

Head over to Three and you can watch the latest reports by Patrick Gower on Newshub about John Ready. The father of nine was kicked out of his job and out of Gloriavale, forced to leave his family behind, because he had brochures from other churches who question the ideology and leadership of Gloriavale. Angel Benjamin, the dark-haired woman showing us her demure wardrobe, is his sister. They now have a night watch patrol at Gloriavale to stop such “contraband” sneaking in. Not part of the show, sorry. Instead we learn about their oven that can make 2,000 buns. Hallelujah.

A TVNZ spokesperson, knowing that this was coming, defended the programme as a “neutral observation, allowing viewers to come to their own conclusions based on both the material in the show and other coverage they may engage with … We respect our audiences’ preferences and it’s not for us to dictate what people should believe personally.”

Anyone who comes to their own conclusions, with or without the The Handmaid’s Tale, can put some hard questions to TVNZ. As part of the programme, Dove Love is promising to answer them in episode five. Call me paranoid, but if the questions on air are only about food, clothes, babies and wedding songs, then our public owned television broadcaster is morally blind. Much like how it all began in Gilead. Under his eye.

A spokesperson from TVNZ has responded to this article:

“Of course we respect your right to have an opinion on the documentary series, but I did want to follow up on how the piece claims TVNZ doesn’t do and won’t do any critical coverage of the community.

“This is simply not true.

“We’ve featured hard-hitting coverage on 1 NEWS, Seven Sharp and Sunday from some this country’s most respected current affairs journalists, including Janet McIntyre and Jehan Casinader.

“A quick search of our news site turns up a number of 1 NEWS stories looking at these very issues in recent months.

“Your article could leave the impression in readers’ minds that TVNZ is silent in a News context. And that’s not the case.”

Gloriavale: The Return premieres on TVNZ onDemand tomorrow, Tuesday May 15.


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