Imagine if shoegazer became the standard in popular music like jazz did in the 1940s. Some equivalent of Ken Burns would at some point make a 10-hour epic chronicling the rise of Slowdive, Ride, Chapterhouse, and most notably My Bloody Valentine, and the shoegazing equivalent of Dave Brubeck would counter the attacks of purists with pronouncements like, "Any idiot can swirl."
Somewhere in this imagined universe, the Emerald Down is firmly stuck in 1991 playing shoegazer standards every Thursday night at a Holiday Inn lounge outside Columbus, maybe staring catatonically at their enormous, pink shag carpet-covered amplifiers while a small crowd of grey-faced business travelers work just intently on their whiskey sours at the bar.
It would take this kind of stylistic dominance, and the kind of sub-sub-genre stratification that would inevitably follow from critics, to tell apart and keep straight the hoards of faceless shoegazer bands that, to this day, keep cropping up inexplicably. I'm sure hardcore devotees of this style of music can recognize the subtle nuances separating all these bands that seem completely interchangeable to those of us who just dabble in what we consider the cream of the crop, but the debut from the Emerald Down, Scream the Sound, is so unabashedly retro that it just strikes me as sad. They've obviously invested a lot of time and energy into getting their imitation "just right."
The question is, why? Why make an album that not only has already been made, and not only been made better, but has been made better about 300 times over at last count. I guess every genre has room for the B and C-league acts, and there are certainly people out there who would eat this up, but there's really no need for this unless you already own the entire output of the above mentioned bands plus about a dozen other groups. Still, there is something sickly endearing about a band so stuck in its own world that it refuses to acknowledge anything much has happened musically since the early 90s.
All the classic shoegazer touchstones are present on Scream the Sound: dense, layered production aesthetic, loads of guitars, everything buried in a primordial soup of sound, and an average song length of six minutes plus. The boy/girl vocals offer a nice touch, though that too has been done about a million times by shoegazer bands, and, besides, everything is covered in such a sonic glaze that all vocals are pretty much indistinguishable from one another.
Their idea of switching gears (like most bands of their ilk) is to flirt with shoegazer's daintier cousin, dream-pop. But this doesn't offer much in the way of variation, and even after three or four times through the album, nothing really stands out. If I had to pick one track, though, it would be "Recondite Astral Traveler" if only for the title alone, but it also has slightly more sinister, almost psychedelic feel to it. A close second would be "Perilized," which strangely reminds me of Soft Cell's "Sex Dwarf."
But in the end, the album simply stands as yet another testament to how influential My Bloody Valentine was/is. Too much so, it seems. So dominant and pervasive is their sound that it has stifled much, if any, stylistic growth within the shoegazer genre, at least on anything above a microcosmic level. Ten years after Loveless, bands the world over (this particular one is from Columbus via Portland) are still eager to faithfully reenact the intoxicatingly dense swirl and shimmering feedback of Kevin Sheilds & Co., showing little desire to push it forward. And the Emerald Down, like so many others, seem more than willing to be lost in sonic maelstrom.
