Dreampop and Shoegaze are genres associated with a reasonably specific time and place. Of course, there had already been music that would, in hindsight, fit into the sonic parameters. Still, the formative scene for such music was very much of the late eighties and early nineties and, at least initially, very much a UK sound. Writing, as I am, from a medium-sized railway town in the Thames Valley, this part of the world in particular can lay claim to several prominent bands – Ride, Chapterhouse and Slowdive.
Okay, history lesson over, but I only mention that to make the point that there is still as much music being made in this vein as ever and proof that the world is, in artistic terms at least, a small place with ideas and inspiration washing over the borders of genre and geography, culture and country, is the fact that this gorgeous piece of dream weaving shoegazery is the product of two musicians based in Cairo, Egypt.
FHMY and AQL are lifelong friends who have faced the ups and downs of life together. “My Blue Heaven” is the first of three singles that the pair has created.
It’s a song that captures everything that was, is and ever will be beautiful about this genre. It is dreamlike and drifting, the guitars ebbing and flowing like a musical tide, the vocals floating along, half-heard, just under the surface of the song. Sometimes understated and poignant, occasionally punchy and powerful, it is a song riding on a sea of tones and textures rather than the usual, cliched sounds.
Serene and squalling, beautiful and brutal, graceful and groovesome, “my blue heaven” is the sound of opposites attracting, and the result is spectacular.
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