If ever you wanted proof that the world is a small place, especially musically speaking, then you only have to look at a band like Uudie’s Swashbuckling Dandies and their latest album, Nowstalgia. It’s an album full of the sort of dream pop and delicate indie sounds that I first encountered via a very UK-o-centric scene and bands like Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, and A.R. Kane (with honorary mentions going to Galaxie 500 and Mazzy Star on the other side of the water.)
So, to find a band making music that echoes those sounds all these years later and as far from the source as Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia is as wonderful as it is surprising.
It is a great album, and Nowstalgia is the perfect play on words for what is found here. Drop the needle and you are immersed in a modern take on a swirl of dreamscapes, alternative pop, psychedelia, and outside-the-box indie thinking.
“Yo Face” is a long piece, but it needs room to move through all its shifting moods—from chiming dream pop vibes to more cinematic drifts, string-driven chamber pop to euphoric indie—a sonic journey if ever there was one. “Could U Rly Luv Me” is almost late-Beatle-esque in its strange, progressive nature and trippy psychedelic sonic ideas.
“oh baby” feels like The Beach Boys had grown up, not surrounded by West Coast folk bands and traditional harmony groups, but had instead been there at the birth of ska and acid rock. “Somewhere Along in Time” rounds us off in a place where the delicacy of dream pop pushes on through into shoegaze’s inner sonic sanctum, poised but powerful.
Nowstalgia proves that genres and geography, era, and style, following fads or fashion, are not what matter in music. What matters is pursuing originality. This is a truly original album; you might be able to recognize the individual musical building blocks that the songs use as their foundations, but the overall sonic architecture that is formed from these is something truly amazing to behold. And that is what actually matters. That is ALL that actually matters.
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