Bowery Electric - s/t

The YouTube numbers tell the story. Amongst the shoegaze/dreampop revival that the gen Z'rs have taken so dearly to their hearts, Bowery Electric still feel like a vastly underrated component of the canon. Too abstract? Not enough guitar overdrive? Who am i to codify the whims of the younger generation? What i will say is that the duo's self-titled debut, now granted its first vinyl reissue since it's original release back in 1995 (don't even look at the prices of those OG presses), has aged remarkably well, a seductive and sultry evolution of spacerock dynamics into something that still feels privately romantic. They do get noisy here in ways not so prevalent on later records, but they also display a soon-to-become trademark delphic quality, a blue-shaded fluttering ambience that is both heavy and romantic, very near to being the exact mid-point between those early Main EPs and the more strung out passages of Loveless. Stoned Loveless, perhaps? When you put it in those terms, it feels like an extremely apt soundtrack for the here and now. A(nother) Kranky all-timer.