See also - AR Kane - Up Home!
Don't call me Helen Lovejoy, but shoegaze's popularity with Gen Z seems to be driven almost entirely by prurience - the sex positive zealots can't stop shagging to it. ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING FILTH! Nevertheless, it could be good news for the too often overlooked A.R. Kane and this latest reissue of debut album Sixty Nine, undoubtedly the horniest sounds of the shoegaze-post-rock-adjacent era. The clue's in that title, but they were also consciously mapping out their interest in the carnal-nocturnal before a note was released, self-describing their music as 'dreampop' way before the term gained any wider generic foothold - we dream as we sleep and we tend to sleep in bed, and we all know what else happens there (and I don't just mean the night sweats). First released in 1988 by Rough Trade and produced by Robin Guthrie, I'd also argue that they were at the vanguard of what we were soon to understand as post-rock, re-imagining the parameters of guitar music through the lens of dub, noise, krautrock, avant-rock ++ Take a song like 'Dizzy', a clash of arcing strings, contrasting primal and speak-sing vocalisations, and shards of indistinguishable metallic feedback that draws connecting lines between John Cale, Disco Inferno and Sarah Records' most vulnerable, Blueboy. This is indie music - with Alex Ayuii's plangent vocal range marking it unmistakably of that lineage - but evolved and ambitiously conceived in ways its whitewashed hagiography so often prevent it being. Comparisons to Cocteau Twins make sense (assisted by Guthrie's involvement no doubt), but it's at least equally connected to Bristol, be that trip hop or the adventurous anti-formalism of the Planet Records group. The sonic range is breathless - no wonder they needed their own terminology to codify it. Up Home! came out the same year, and is a slightly more formative expression, though it's also strangely more focused - here they lock in and define their dreampop vision, on Sixty Nine they're already moving the boundaries of what that might mean, getting weirder, harder to pigeonhole, and ultimately much more confident. This is not just between-the-sheets-noise for the zoomers - this is the kind of music that ages with both mystery and grace, head music for the mind and body.
