The High Violets - Sun Baby

A definitive example of nu-gaze, the High Violets are a post-millennium band who proudly wear their shoegazing influences on their sleeve.

Straddling the line between Dream Pop and Shoegaze (this song falls more in the shoegaze camp), the Violets craft a uniquely easy-to-enjoy concoction of Kaitlyn Ni Donovan's creamy vocals layered on a stack of tastefully fuzzed-out guitars.

The resulting sound is one of the most accessible, user-friendly, and easy-to-imbibe concoctions in the shoegaze realm.  I could listen to it all day.   

Curve - Horror Head

Curve sounds like a band, but it's really just a talented duo: the astonishing multi-instrumentalist Dean Garcia, who composes and plays all the music, and the beautiful, breathy Toni Halliday on vocals.  Curve became an on-again/off-again project for the two of them spanning 5 albums over 15 years.

Garcia is primarily known as a widely admired bass player, but on the Curve albums he really flexes his muscles, playing not only the bass, but the guitars, drums, and everything else.  Nevertheless, his bass lines are still my favorite part of Curve. Perhaps it's because I'm a bass player myself, but his distinctive bass tone and driving pulse stand out for me as the heart of the Curve sound.

Though Garcia and Halliday resisted the shoegazing label, insisting they were doing something unique, looking back from the vantage point of 2016 there is no doubt in my mind that Curve—with its breathy vocals and ringing Cocteau-Twins-like guitar sound— falls squarely within the shoegazing mainstream.

Ride - Leave Them All Behind

One of the hardest-rocking songs in the shoegaze canon, Leave Them All Behind is the only Ride song in my permanent playlist.  For some reason, despite the band's widespread popularity, other Ride songs just don't quite do it for me.  But this one more than makes up for it.  For this song alone they belong in the Shoegaze Hall of Fame.

From the seductive drum-and-bass intro, to the blistering guitar assault, to the reverb-wah solo at 6:15, to the crushing wall of noise at the end, this song takes the all the trappings of the shoegazing style and turns them up to 11.

The song is a case study in interacting harmonic layers, and I can't decide which I enjoy more, the screechy harmonies of Ride's big pile of dirty guitars, or the gorgeous vocal harmonies that start around 4:00.   I've heard this song hundreds of times, and I still get chills when they hit that tonal down-shift in the middle of that choral section.

The unique combination of gut-punch guitars, haunting harmonies, and addictive groove make this song a hard-shoegaze classic.