A Limerick Ox - Blog Archive

Ever noticed how muffins have turned into pastries? If you go into most coffee shops and ask for a muffin, there isn’t much to differentiate it from an actual cupcake: super-sugary and ultra moist, injected with all sorts of jams and fillings, built up on empty calories. Seems to me a muffin has to be hearty, grainy, adorned with a few dried fruit or nuts, thusly capable of sustaining one’s appetite from breakfast to lunchtime. You don’t hold over to lunch on cake. Cake’s not a solution. You don’t have cake for breakfast. Except maybe on your birthday. Or the day after your birthday. Probably during the Holidays you can pull it off too. But at any other moment, no cake for breakfast!

But now, most people can’t tell the difference between a “real muffin” and a “cake-muffin.” If they did know the difference, they wouldn’t be fooled by cake-muffins and realise just what they were missing out on. It’s the same thing when it comes to shoegazer rock. The sub-genre has more than its share of lightweights who attempt to convince folks they have it down, when it’s just a lot of reverb and hollow noise. Unlike Dead Leaf Echo who understand the texturing needed to pull off an excellent shoegazing experience, and they show it off with aesthetical, melodic authority.

Their song Pale Fire is as much a shoegazing clinic as you’ll have the chance to hear this year, as the band hits all the right nuances, atmospheres, and ambiances, place the melody to the forefront and use their fulgent instrumentation to achieve that elevating starry haze. The guitars reverb with grace amidst the drifting synth pads, the voicework is drenched in waking dream echoes, and the drumwork’s slightly distorted mistyness carry the telltale Ulrich Schnauss (who mixed the song) signature of trebly waterfalls of sheer percussion.

Listening to this song is exactly like biting into a real muffin. You wonder what the hell you were chewing on beforehand.

MP3: Dead Leaf Echo - Pale Fire

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 12:25 pm and is filed under dead leaf echo, download, free, MP3, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.