Kraus and "Hard Shoegaze"
The new album by Kraus, “Path”, asks all kinds of questions about the nature of music.
It’s an example of how the human voice can be used in new and weird ways to interesting musical effect. The singing here is soft, airy (to extremes at times), and a bit loose but overall mostly well-tuned.There’s a cool bit of black metal screaming way in the background of the productions too. Its good, I like it.
Beyond the voice, this album has great production overall. There are some clear and obvious spots where the band references sounds from My Bloody Valentine’s seminal record Loveless, and who can blame them. The first non-ambient song on the record, Bum, is the most blatant example of this, and I don’t mind it at all. It sounds amazing.
Overall the record shows off a remarkable amount of variety, each song has a slightly different approach to the main shoegaze aesthetic.
What’s really interesting to me is that this album is, for lack of a better phrase, “hard” shoegaze. The same way that hard rock is more intense than rock, this is more shoegazey than anything I’ve heard before. It’s intensely shoegaze. Its hard shoegaze.
There’s got to be a better name for it.
It helps me realize the idea that any genre can be “hard” compared to the first incarnations. You can (and people have) turn up the fire on the core elements of math rock, or drum n bass, or twee pop, or any number of genres. You can be all-in on that aesthetic.
There’s something cool about when a band can go way harder on an aesthetic than anybody has before, and it comes out in a satisfying way.
Kraus pushes the envelope. I love this album, and I’m excited to see if the band can find interesting and unexpected ways to move forward on the followup record in a year or two.
Here’s some examples:
What do you think?
