Prepare to lose yourself in a wall of beautiful, blinding noise. Released in January 2016 by the archival wizards at Cherry Red Records, Still In A Dream: A Story Of Shoegaze 1988–1995 is a monumental, 5-CD box set that functions as the absolute, definitive encyclopedia of the "scene that celebrated itself". Spanning 87 tracks and housed in a gorgeous, text-heavy media book, this compilation chronicles the dizzying rise, critical assassination, and global dispersion of a genre defined by cathedral-sized reverbs, over-driven distortion, and buried, angelic vocals. It is a breathtaking map of a sonic revolution that proved volume and vulnerability could exist in the exact same breath.
What elevates Still In A Dream above lazy nostalgia trips is its brilliant, multi-national and chronological framework. It doesn't treat shoegaze as a brief, insular flash in the pan localized entirely to the Thames Valley; instead, it tracks the genre's ancestral roots, its chart-scaling peaks, its darkest experimental alleyways, and its ultimate migration across the Atlantic and over to Japan. It meticulously documents how a derogatory nickname thrown around by cynical NME and Melody Maker journalists mutated into a timeless, globally revered musical language that continues to inspire bedroom producers and alternative icons decades later.
