Released: 2023
Like it or not, but there were plenty of folks who at the time took great pleasure in seeing shoegaze’s rapid tailspin into oblivion. The story is a well documented one; along came grunge and strangled it to death, with bands like slowdive very much getting what they’d had coming to them (Anon, NME).
This was not before they’d released a stunning third album in Pygmalion, but the movement’s unlikely twenty first century revival has rehabilitated the old and encouraged the new, such that Rachel Goswell and friends saw 2023’s everything is alive greeted with levels of critical appreciation that was in short supply thirty years before.
Kisses preceded it and was a familiar strategy (The not quite album-representative Trojan Horse) in an unfamiliar guise (Sugary dream pop that sat between Saint Etienne and the Cocteau Twins). Here then was a band that had survived an extinction event some saw as their destiny; death became them, and kisses were what they dedicated to the ones who were last laughed at.
The Voice Of Unreason 