Graywave – Planetary Shift
Where would shoegaze be without the space programme? The Voyager 1 probe returned the famous Pale Blue Dot photograph in 1990, and a few years later Slowdive released Souvlaki Space Station. A terrible sense of vulnerability seems to permeate both the song and the image – ‘That’s us,’ they seem to say, daring us to look closer, ‘that’s all of us.’ Few genres sketch more effectively at what space might actually feel like, and Graywave’s new EP Planetary Shift pushes this ethos as far as its slight runtime will allow. Here are songs about placelessness, sent careering off their axes by sour guitar arpeggios and otherworldly synths.
A sense of isolation is introduced in the song Dreaming, which hangs on two restless guitar chords for almost its entire runtime, but it reaches its apotheosis in the EP’s title track. Planetary Shift appears at first listen to be little more than an interlude – itself a bold move on an EP only five tracks long. Its sparse production marks an abrupt departure from the lushness of the opening tracks, but Graywave’s falsetto and unsettled guitar strums speak to an emptiness that can fairly be described as cosmic. ‘Stare at the sun…’ she begins, the melody shivering against a backdrop of tape delay and radio static, ‘same as before…’ It’s a howling wilderness of a song that illustrates that Graywave is not limited to the quiet / loud dynamic that characterises so much of alt-rock. The dynamic here is closer to quiet / slightly-less-quiet, with sun-bleached piano lines gradually making their presence felt in a haze of half-remembered sounds and textures.
Standout track Like Heaven hints at human connection with a chorus that seems to promise both intimacy and forgiveness. But even here, Graywave’s voice is deliberately kept at a distance, buried under so many layers of delay and distortion that we’re left with just her cadences. This voice-as-instrument approach has always been a hallmark of the shoegaze genre, but it’s especially heart-rending here. We strain to decipher the lyrics from the fragments left to us, but it’s impossible. The distances are just too great.
Planetary Shift EP closes out with Before, a raucous vignette that unleashes the full force of Graywave’s voice. The delicate arpeggios that open the song soon dissolve into walls of distortion and delay, and the effect is both thrilling and deeply melancholic. Howling guitars and drums send Graywave off into the night, and all we can do is crane our necks, feet still planted dumbly on the ground, and wish them safe travels.
Planetary Shift is out on April 23rd via False Peak Records.
The EP is available to purchase both digitally and on 10″ vinyl here.
Christopher R. Moore
