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Shoegaze
2004
With the onset of adulthood and the resultant annoyances of grown-up responsibilities, you can’t really be as bothered about all things shoegaze as you used to. Consequently, you begin developing subconscious filters to try to ensure that the music you do listen to are the cream of the crop. Band names may be a superficial proxy for the quality of the music, but for genre matching, its precision is unparalleled.
I basically don’t even have to listen to Explosions in the Sky, Junius or This Will Destroy You to know that they are full of bearded dudes in plaid. They likely also dabble in the art of 8-13 minute instrumentals with 3 parts gentle guitar noodling and one part ostensibly ear-crushing, sweeping, “epic” riffage certain to evoke a solitary tear to the eye of the most hardened metalhead. Amusement Parks on Fire probably falls into the same general category, right?
Well, sort of. Guitarist (and for this album, solo artist) Michael Feerick looks like he can barely grow facial hair, and seeing as how he released this at 19, may actually not have been able to. That said, there are some solid cuts in this 10-track debut that may appeal to fans of Swervedriver, Smashing Pumpkins and even that rarest of beasts, Christian shoegazers Starflyer 59.
The mournful, string-laden instrumental “23 Jewels” crossfades nicely into the triumphantly overdriven guitar stomp of “Venus in Cancer”. Its incendiary Dinosaur Jr.-influenced guitar lines are somewhat bizarrely best known for appearing on the soundtrack for EA Sports’ Rugby ‘06. The distorted riffage continues on “Eighty Eight” and “Wiper”, although the wall of guitars does start to feel repetitive around this point.
Like Swervedriver, AMOF’s best moments are tracks with lo-fi garage energy like “Venosa” and “Smokescreen”. The post-rock detour of “Asphalt (Interlude) however is good, mixing a simple piano-with-strings melody with near-muted amplifier feedback slowly being brought in from the background the fore before exploding into a miasma of J. Mascis and Billy Corgan riffs right at the end. Yes, the description is near-identical to the formulaic post-rock I derided earlier, but the blueprint works a lot better when it’s limited to 4 minutes, as it is here.
Instrumental closer “Local Boy Makes God” is solid as well, with My Bloody Valentine-style blasts of floating feedback and delay processed through Dirty-era Sonic Youth effects pedals. Tasty. The spot-the-influence meter here is clearly tilted towards Smashing Pumpkins rather than MBV, but that’s hardly a bad balance to strike. As debut records by 19-year old multi-instrumentalists in the early 2000s go, this could have gone a lot, lot worse. Kudos is apropos.
TRACKLIST
- 1 23 Jewels ★
- 2 Venus in Cancer
- 3 Eighty Eight
- 4 Wiper ★
- 5 Venosa ★
- 6 Asphalt (Interlude) ★
- 7 Smokescreen
- 8 The Ramones Book
- 9 Local Boy Makes God ★
