Lying Season - Press Play

I had never heard of Lying Season until they hit me up to book them for a show at Bruce’s, the DIY venue I ran out of a metal forge in rural New Jersey (I used to be so fucking cool, man -- what happened?!). Apparently, their singer had played guitar in Hydrangeas, another band I had booked (and one which, if they ever release any physical music, I will certainly review here). They described themselves as “internet music”, a term I usually associate with genre-fucking solo projects with weird samples and re-pitched vocals by people who are allergic to the term “hyperpop”. Imagine my surprise when they pull up with a four piece band in addition to their Boss SP-303 and pull off some gnarly shoegaze - and I mean real shoegaze.

As basically anyone who’s in deep enough to be reading this blog knows, the word “shoegaze” has been stretched to meaninglessness in recent years. According to teenagers who don’t know any better, anything from Deftones, to Jane Remover, to Beach House, to even the odd Boris track could be “shoegaze”. Among live bands that I’ve seen call themselves shoegaze, they’re almost universally more indebted to alternative metal and even post-grunge than the 1990s British bands that burned so brightly they destroyed themselves. Don’t get me wrong, I still adore Cloakroom’s doom-adjacent shoegaze and Balance & Composure’s post-hardcore-with-reverb sound, but the Americanization of shoegaze has left me wanting. Every day I feel closer and closer to throwing up my hands and saying “all my homies hate Title Fight”.

Lying Season’s disc Press Play gives me hope that some English indie sounds can peek through the rubble of the American scene. The disc starts off strong with “poison death” which is a slightly more articulate MBV wall of sound, replete with gliding guitars, mushy vocal delivery. I love the super-effected snare here. The drums and bass sound like they were tracked rather than programmed. It then glides into the ambient opening of “nevernear”, which then progresses into stereo-candy drum machine beats and reverse-delayed guitars. I’m pretty sure this one is about a pandemic-era relationship. It gets noisy, but never really heavy - it gets textured, but never really murky. “head and a quarter” is the fastest track on Press Play, with straight-up pop punk drums and guitar. It’s fun, short, and a nice change of pace for the disc. It’s quickly followed by “¿poolepat (interlude)”, which is correctly put where a tape or vinyl record would be flipped. That’s about the most I can say about it.

Side B is all about ripping off Ride. “l a d y b u g” is a rip-off of “Vapour Trail”, stretched out to nearly eight minutes. Instead of the original’s octaved Rickenbackers, they borrow a trick from Alice in Chains, which I presume is their namesake, and use piezoelectric acoustic with a little chorus on this one for the verses and then throw some gauzy electric on top. It’s not a bad song per se, but it is a transparent one, and it wins most of its points back with me simply because most american shoegaze bands don’t reference Ride at all. “whatgoesupmaynotcomedown” sounds more like Tarantula-era Ride, rocking and rolling more unabashedly than elsewhere on the record. It gets more gauzy as the song goes on, and then ends with a flicker of synths and reverb trails that had been absent for the whole side.

The packaging is minimal and DIY, but not to the spartan extent of my last review. A plain burned CD sits in plain view from the clear jewel case. I’ve never seen a case like this. It has rounded edges, floppier material, and a cute little button that serves as both a hub for the disc and a lock to keep the case closed. A little sticker in the corner tells me that this is disc 20 of 30. Similar to that Possum in my Room album, the Bandcamp album art is completely missing. On the back, a sticker with similar aesthetics gives us at least a little information - the band name, album title, song titles, and a little bit about the band and recording. It’s messy and hard to read, but on-brand for the genre.

Despite high-gain guitars being used all over this album, they always sound more fizzy than chunky. This is something that most americanized shoegaze tries to avoid, but it leaves a good amount of sonic room for the bass guitar, the 808s, and the kick to pump. The tempos are faster than the songs they’re aping, which keeps the track lengths from dragging the quality down too much. With five songs and one interlude, I understand why they called it an EP, but at 28 minutes long, I’m going to call it an LP. They can write me a strongly worded email about it, I don’t care. I look forward to what these kids do next.

Press Play by Lying Season is a good album, and I like it.