Show Review: The New Colossus Festival Shoegaze Night Party At Arlene’s Grocery. March 9th, 2024.
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your shoe's untied
March 11, 2024
Day is done, gone the sun. But fear not, here is the review for the Shoegaze Night Party at Arlene’s Grocery as part of The New Colossus Festival featuring Boy With Apple, Melody Fields, Mr. Floyd Larry, Sugar For The Pill, and Oceans. This event was the back half of the all day shoegaze marathon. If you have not read the day party review you can check it out here.
The night began with Boy With Apple. This group hailed all the way from Sweden and featured a drumless setup. Instead, a co-frontwoman operated a fizzy synthesizer, drum machine, and sang. These songs were soft and sweet, this essence largely captured by two female vocalists often singing together. They talked amongst themselves in Swedish on stage between numbers, which we found to be just as cool as the songs themselves.
Melody Fields were also from Sweden, and they too had a synth in their mix. This group was musically and visually polished with all members dressed in earthy tones of dark green and black. This was fitting because we imagined a whole landscape with their music. They filled out the frequency spectrum as good as any group that day, with the synth players' high keys and her breezy voice complementing the male vocalist and deep rhythm section. At the end of one song was a refrain “it’s a life well lived” and we agree.
Mr. Floyd Larry, not to be confused with Floyd The Barber, stopped by on their East Coast tour from Miami. Drumming was quick and fluttering, hair was everywhere, three of them were singing. We stayed sober for the day party but were four drinks deep at this point so looking at our notes all we have left is “waves of vibes” and that one of them accused another of “farting too much” on tour.
Sugar For The Pill was sweet. Another female fronted group with vocals floating high above the fray of sound. Her bright floral dress stood out with all other members wearing black. Their songs were always moving forward, looking ahead to a brighter tomorrow. We cannot overstate the scale of sonic possibilities when a band has three guitars at their disposal.
The members of Oceans, from Australia, had just been killed and brought back to life to deliver their scorching set. Or at least that’s what their undead makeup had us believing. It was fitting, their frontwoman screamed into the microphone and seemed slightly possessed. For a quintet there was a tremendous amount of sonic breathing room to their sound. Some songs were moody, some were bouncy. They were incredibly good at switching from an airy to a dense sound at the turn of a dime.
This was the longest event we’ve covered so far. It caught our attention because shoegaze is everywhere in 2024. We’ve always thought that rap would fall off in the 2020’s, creating space for another Rock and Roll resurgence. What we did not expect was that one of the first rock subgenres to catch fire would be shoegaze. We had a limited view of its potential and what even qualifies as shoegaze, a view that was bounded by first wave acts like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins, etc. This Pitchfork article “The Shoegaze Revival Hit Its Stride in 2023” opened our eyes to what’s going on within the genre. Our biggest takeaway from it was that the musical boundaries and more importantly the diversity of artists coming into the fold were expanding. This was on full display at Arlene’s Grocery. Genders, ethnicities, and nationalities were boundless and so was the music. No two acts sounded remotely the same or were even structured similarly. We’ve always believed that music is the vanguard of multiculturalism and all these great bands further cemented that belief.
Give these bands a listen, check out the day party review, and connect with them on social media below!
