It’s possible there couldn’t have been a worse year for Brooklyn’s Dead Leaf Echo to release their debut.
After My Bloody Valentine’s overachieving return, there’s a very real question surrounding the continued relevance of the thousands of shoegaze bands that have sprung up since Loveless to try and fill their shoes.
Dead Leaf Echo try their hardest to give you a reason to think otherwise.
The most notable thing about Thought And Language and what sets it apart from a lot of other Kevin Shields-worshiping bands is the production which is arguably the hardest thing to nail in shoegaze music.
Joe Lambert, who mastered Deerhunter’s masterpieces, does an impressive job blending everything into dizzying walls of sound.
Unfortunately the songwriting and album structure is not as strong. The record is heavily front loaded with record highlights “Kingmaker” and “Memorytraces” and the most innovative and interesting song, “Conception” being covered too quickly.
This leaves the rest of the record to slowly lower you to the ground with a bunch of well executed, yet otherwise unremarkable tracks.
The best shoegaze records are never overly immediate or constantly engaging, but Thought And Language exploits this to the point where at times it becomes numbing.
It’s still a very good effort, it matches and at points even surpasses some of the best recent efforts from the genre. Still, even if you have an unquenchable thirst for this stuff, it’s hard to justify listening to imitators during the honeymoon period of the first My Bloody Valentine release in 22 years.
