In Solarium

Album review

The genre of shoegaze has pretty much been dead for awhile now, with the demise of the pioneers of such dreamy, textured sound (Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine). Loveless remains the untouched masterpiece of not only that genre, but for many, music as a whole; there are few albums that can come close to its resonance or sweeping indefinable beauty. Since then, countless bands have attempted to recapture the spirit of this lost art; most of them fail miserably, trying too hard to fill shoes that could never be filled. Coming out of nowhere, or Estonia if you insist on being precise, Pia Fraus make the closest attempt to recovering some of what made shoegaze so great with their first widely available album In Solarium. While it is obviously a stripped-down yet blatant mimicry of the sounds created on Loveless, there is still an unavoidable power within it. The thing is, they rip My Bloody Valentine so well that most people would hear it and think they had found a second disc to Loveless that no one ever knew about. It's that close. So basically, if you are fan of noisy dream pop and have accepted the fact that Kevin Shields will probably never do another album, you can buy this and at least have something close.

© Blake Butler /TiVo