Maelstrom Sigh: Candy Claws On The Fragile Power Of Shoegaze
Shoegaze is a word that began almost as an insult, before being worn as a badge of honour. Essentially a nebulous term that captured the music of a handful of bands on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s become a global movement of songwriters who blend pedal-led guitar experimentation with exquisite pop.
In the 21st century, no conversation surrounding shoegaze could afford to ignore American group Candy Claws. Merging amplifier bedlam to their penchant for Baroque songwriting, the group’s nigh-on perfect run – three albums, then out – has stood the test of time.
‘Ceres & Calypso In The Deep Time’ was their final statement, and it saw Candy Claws – Ryan Hover, K Hover, and Hank Bertholf – reach for perfection. Re-framing shoegaze and dream pop aspects, it dipped into 60s pop, while also looking beyond music for points of inspiration.
A 10th anniversary edition has just been released, bringing Candy Claws’ finest statement back to vinyl. In this essay, the band’s Ryan Hover writes for Clash on what shoegaze means to him, and ties the work of his peers to the English painter Turner.
A fascinating epistle, you can read it in full below.
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Is shoegaze important? Is it relevant these days? With its vague lyrics buried under a tumult of guitar, does it have anything to say? Among the rock styles, it might be the last glimpse of pure sonic expression in a time when everything is expected to carry an important, relevant message. If it has nothing to say, it is freed to evoke what can only be felt.
To narrow our focus, let’s take My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Loveless’ as the pinnacle of the genre, and compare its innovations with the work of 19-century painter J.M.W. Turner, whose later seascapes enraged many of his contemporaries in their nigh-abandonment of form and representation in favor of light, color, and atmosphere as the primary subjects. Like the bands whose withdrawn stage demeanor gave the shoegaze genre its name, Turner was a private figure infamous for a waspish, cryptic temperment. For both, words were an obstacle to a more honest kind of connection, and in both cases their art bypasses verbal or narrative conveyance of meaning, opting instead to elevate the study of light, timbre, texture, and movement to a higher form. They even coincide visually – the cover of ‘Loveless’, viewed at a distance, could be another of Turner’s Petworth interiors in their hazy, pink-hued intimacy.
Essayist William Hazlitt summed up Turner’s later work as “paintings of nothing, and very like.” Like shoegaze, this art isn’t about anything – it is the thing, the direct experience. Although Turner often referenced real or mythical events, and the songs on ‘Loveless’ are sung with mostly real words, the intention in either case is not to tell a story but to immerse in an environment and evoke feeling – no agenda, just sensation. But sensation masterfully composed. Turner drew on a lifetime of experience as an expert landscape and architecture painter to develop his innovative techniques of treating oils as watercolors, layering and blurring the paint to achieve atmospheric effects, and completely reworking his canvasses even as they hung on display in galleries. Shields did pretty much everything “wrong” in the studio not out of amateurism but because of a new, uncompromising vision. The songs on Loveless, while following a more simplified folk music structure to allow greater experimentation in layers of guitar, are accomplished musical arrangements on their own, vocal melodies weaving through the chords in surprising ways alongside the subtly complex basslines. Departure from representation or narrative in art only works when informed by a mastery of the form’s basic elements since it removes everything else.
Yet this retreat from narrative meaning is not a complete descent into formless abstraction for either ‘Loveless’ or Turner. Each still carries a human connection amid the wild sea- or sound-scape. In the music, the warped eruption of guitar is anchored by simple song structures, basic rhythms, and short, repeated hooks. By adhering to the framework of rock music, the radical experimentation makes more of a statement than in isolation. In the paintings, a ship tossed on the waves or the faint line of a distance coastline give scale to the roiling storm that blurs sea into sky. There is a place for us within these forms of art, in all their ferocity. Shrieks of feedback are wrought into melody, sharp spasms of paint elicit a lightning-pierced downpour. When we recognise and connect to certain elements, the innovations are thrown into sharper contrast.
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Innovation is the correct word here – these new forms weren’t frivolous or accidental. On a stormy sea voyage, an aging Turner insisted on being lashed to the mast in order to experience the tempest in its fullest, from within. Snow Storm – Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth is the record of his four hours in the mouth of the storm. A similar single-minded obsession is evident in the making of Loveless, recorded across nineteen different studios. Regardless of which stories you believe about how many hundreds of thousands of dollars the album cost, or if it actually bankrupted the label, the final result shows that Shields’ exacting process had a distinct vision in mind. In both cases, why such reckless dedication to new forms of expression which, when realised, turn out to have done away with clarity and theme in favor of a more primal vagueness? Why was it so important to them, and why is it important for us?
‘The key to both ‘Loveless’ and Turner is this: They demonstrate power without aggression – shoegaze in its novel marriage of loud instruments with quiet, intimate vocals; Turner in his exploration of the stark beauty of nature’s violence. ‘Loveless’ starts at the human and looks inward, expressing the variance of the emotional experience through a soundscape alternating between deafening ecstasy and quiet comtemplation. Turner starts at the human and looks outward, dwarfing us in the immensity of the universe’s indifference. A wordless connection, an insistence on humility.
At the heart of the maelstrom is some kind of delicate grace, a quiet, persistent compassion within the chaos. And on the reverse, the more serene songs and paintings shimmer with a gentle, threatening distortion. This amalgam of danger and beauty is what separates shoegaze from metal on the one side and dream pop on the other, Turner from the Impressionists he inspired. It doesn’t choose between prettiness and cacophony, nor does it find a weak compromise between the two. It embraces the surge – the more extreme, the more exquisite. The vocals aren’t the sound of timid beings weathering a storm – they are the voice of the storm, and that is the revelation. Power doesn’t have to be hostile, violence doesn’t have to be destructive. Chuck Klosterman summed it up perfectly when he wrote, “‘Loveless’ has a layered, inverted thickness that makes harsh sounds soft and fragile moments vast.”
It’s this gentle voice amid the howl that makes shoegaze important. Compassion, quietness, and grace are not weakness; on the contrary, they will be the foundation of our strength if we are to endure.
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The 10th anniversary edition of ‘Ceres & Calypso In The Deep Time’ is out now.
Photo Credit: Eric Evans
