Noisey vs. MetalSucks: Shoegaze Metal, All Hype or Totally Hip?
Welcome to Noisey Vs. MetalSucks, a bi-weekly column in which the staff of Noisey and the staff of MetalSucks will engage in vigorous academic debate concerning some of extreme music’s most relevant topics of the day. For this week’s edition, MetalSucks’ own Vince Neilstein does battle with Noisey’s Jon Wiederhorn on the subject shoegaze metal: is the genre all hype or totally hip? Read Vince’s position below, then head over to Noisey to check out Jon’s counter-argument. Enjoy!
Full disclosure: before writing this article I had to do some research (via the always 100% reliable Wikipedia, naturally) on shoegaze metal just to make sure I was thinking of the right genre. I was. That’s how little I care about shoegaze metal. The name says it all, doesn’t it? Booooring.
I exaggerate, of course. I’ve listened to plenty of shoegaze bands in my day, and not all shoegaze bands are boring just as not all bands in any one sub-genre suck (even metalcore/deathcore/djent/insert-trendy-sub-genre-of-the-moment-here). There are those who do something cool with it and those who don’t. But I don’t go to the metal show to get stoned out of my gourd and lose my mind in the neverending, plodding laundry machine noises of shoegaze, post-metal, drone, or whatever you wanna call it… I’ve got Sigur Ros for that. I go to the metal show to ROCK. To HEADBANG. When I was a younger man, to get my jimmies out and MOSH. Because metal is FUN! When my friends in high school were sitting in their darkened bedrooms fawning over shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine I was running around mine playing air guitar to Van Halen. Live it up, people!
Speaking of Van Halen, shoegaze metal is also short on stellar musicianship, a key component of what drew me to metal in the first place. Sheogaze is about creating a mood, a soundscape, an atmosphere, I get it. That’s perfectly fine when MetalGF and I host a dinner party (Neurosis goes great with duck confit and roasted kale chips!), but doesn’t work so well when I’m out at a show trying to have a good time. This is incredibly simpleton of me to say, but it’s true: I wanna see metal guys headbanging and playing cool shit on their instruments that I am not capable of doing myself. I want a big show — or at least a hot, sweaty and energetic one — not some dudes standing around looking at their pedalboards as they carefully orchestrate reverb and echo swells that last for 20 minutes. And that’s to say nothing of Sunn O))); don’t even get me started, that’s a whole other rabbit hole.
On the other hand, there are bands that incorporate elements of shoegaze into a broader overall sound that I’m quite fond of: Cult of Luna, The Ocean, and even Isis in their more focused moments, to name but a few. It works quite well in measured doses, since after all we can’t just party and rock all the time. It’s just that too much of the stuff gets old quickly.
