Tag: Loveless (1991 My Bloody Valentine album)

The First Eloi’s Shoegaze Song “Last Days of Summer” is the Sound of the Mind’s Transition From a Time of Adventures to a Season of Reflection

The First Eloi, photo courtesy the artists

The First Eloi’s single “Last Days of Summer” resonates with that feeling that many of us recognize as the long days of the late spring and summer and the hot days and warm nights transition to sunny days and cooler evenings. It’s a mood that for can trigger memories of summer vacations being over and being back in school whether elementary or secondary or university and a time of adventures and good times give way to getting into the swing of regular life and colder temperatures, a shift into introspective moods and taking stock and getting the work of life done. But for a brief time those recent memories are so vivid even if they seem to be so recently far into the past and beyond reach except as moments to warm your mind when they come back to you. The wintry guitar tones and ethereal vocals along with the more textured riff give these feelings an almost tactile quality in the song like a resurrection of what energy My Bloody Valentine tapped into and embodied when Loveless dropped in November of 1991 and seemed to infuse the season with a dense layers and dreamlike atmospheres. The First Eloi tends to wax a little more dream pop than that but “Last Days of Summer” and a good deal of the rest of the Low Glow the group released on September 13, 2023 is reminiscent of the early shoegaze classic and its true fusion of texture, tone and organic rhythms. Listen to “Last Days of Summer” on Spotify and follow The First Eloi at the links below.

The First Eloi on YouTube

The First Eloi on Bandcamp

The First Eloi on Instagram

Totem Pocket Exudes the Vibrant Energy of Turning Private Joyful Catharsis Into Expansively Colorful Music With “Keep It In Your Mind”

Totem Pocket, photo courtesy the artists

“Keep It In Your Mind,” the final track on Totem Pocket’s self-titled album that dropped on September 30, 2022 is a maximalist rock summary of what you’re in for in listening to the band and seeing it live. One hears vocals slightly behind the mix like something you’d hear on a Dinosaur Jr record. But there is an orchestration of tones and a swirling and energetic flow of guitar and percussion that in spite of being fairly spirited comes off as introspective. Like it was born of capturing private moments of joy and discovery and the catharsis that comes from being able to give voice to the kinds of feelings one has alone in creating the music. The touchstones are there with the tone bending toward the end of the song like the trailing ends of Loveless and the psychedelic freakout jam when Built To Spill launches into a confessional sprawl of yearning and reaching for connection with something bigger. Somewhere in the architecture of the music one can detect how maybe the members of the band had discovered playing rock music in some style popular among their collective peers but then got so bored with the conformity of that comfort and the fake rewards of adolescent popularity and decided to tumble headlong into more cosmic sonic territory as a palette for expressing genuine feeling. Listen to “Keep It In Your Mind” Bandcamp and follow Denver-based Totem Pocket at the links below.

Totem Pocket on Instagram