The secret of Kalamazoo? Am I talking about some comic or the latest Indiana Jones-sequel? No, not exactly but near Michigan (that’s the US in case you’re dumb) there is a place called Kalamazoo and around 70.000 people are living of there. Among them you can find Joshua Garman and Chris Wahamaki, two shoegazers who unite their talents in a band called Crash City Saints.
So yes, here we are again talking about them. Why not? You read every day about the likes of Christina Aguilera or Lady Gaga and they have no talent, so why not writing (and thus reading) about a band who offers us the most noisy (and melodic) shoegazing stuff you can imagine?
Anyway, after hearing my Rhino Boxset from Jesus & The Mary Chain, I picked up without thinking their “Returner”-EP and it gave me the same vibes. The only thing remains of course that the brothers Reid are known everywhere whereas these two Americans are obscure as fuck. Or is it so then that this is just outside America?
Mind you, not all Americans are banging their heads to the tunes of Sugar or Swervedriver but it’s certainly so that the shoegazingsscene in America means something. In fact, did you even know that there is a shoegazingfestival in the US? If you wanna see it, you’ll have to travel to (here we go again) to Kalamazoo and it’s called Kalamashoegazer and shoegazing bands from different American departments are playing there. I know, it only makes you jealous and in some way it makes you sad not to be a Kalamazoo-inhabitant.
When hearing their “Returner”-EP, critics might think that they’re not original and from a band who claims that they’ve been influenced by watching too much episodes from 120 Minutes circa 1991 you won’t expect anything different, but the thing is that there’s now finally a scene worth following after a decade of nothing, so let’s celebrate that.
Maybe it also becomes the scene that celebrates itself part 2 but who cares about that anyway?
Not everyone I know is happy that bands are taking up old sounds but that’s bullshit. I follow music since the day I was born (well no, actually since I was 6 and I’m now 41, so count) and the list of bands who are trying to do what The Beatles once did is an endless one. And still if someone comes up pretending to be the new Beatles they’re hailed but for a band who tries to refine (or their own interpretations) from bands like Slowdive or Sugar then it’s like they’re tasting the forbidden fruit. At least it looked like this is changing…
Some years ago bands like Editors or Interpol were pointing the public to the fact that there was good music around in the 80’s. The 80’s were more than Cyndi Lauper, there was also something like “Pornography” by The Cure.
You might dislike both Interpol and Editors but these bands provoked a situation in where new bands (take for instance Coldcave) don’t have to be sound like the sons of Nirvana, or 10.000 times worser, the bastards from Red Hot Chilli Peppers.
The same is happening now in the States with the shoegazing scene. The hard truth is of course that ten years ago there were also shoegazing bands around (Vapor Trail, Deardarkhead, Spindle Shanks, Shallow) but no one cared to notice them, simply because the press decided it wasn’t important to write about such things.
Times are definitely changing as now there is something like a My Space Generation and without the help from the traditional press, bands like A Place To Bury Strangers and since recently Veil Veil Vanish are entering the doors of worldwide recognition.
What was caused by Interpol can hopefully be caused by them too, and if that happens then Crash City Saints deserve their piece of fame too.
If you wanna check it out then here you can find ‘em : http://www.myspace.com/crashcitysaints
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