Minimal shoegaze

Attention Please is as far away as you can get from shoegaze while still being shoegaze. It’s actually a pretty unique-sounding album for the genre and I never gave it enough credit for that before.

I have to say though: Wata may be a good guitarist, but she is a terrible vocalist, and I’m not the kind of guy who gets suckered in by any female voice just because it’s female. Her range is almost non-existent and if she goes above speaking to singing her voice instantly becomes a hoarse whisper. A female voice suits this kind of airy tone well, but nearly any guest vocalist they could have found would have probably done a better job on vocals. Getting your female guitarist that all the white nerds have been swooning over to suddenly do lead vocals strikes me as a gimmick worthy of the album’s title.

I wanted to end this review on a positive note, which refers to the rest of the album. Attention Please is minimal shoegaze if there ever was such a thing, bordering on post-rock. The noisy wall-of-sound guitars that make something shoegaze are very lightly there, blowing by like a gentle breeze as opposed to the forceful whirlwind of sound that usually comes with shoegaze (the exception being the song “Spoon”). Attention Please is a very sparse album in an often very dense-sounding genre. And if you’re a big shoegaze fan you know how derivative and dried up the genre is, and anything that’s an original take on the genre is worth a lot. However, while I do think that Attention Please is full of good songs, very few of them are amazing. In fact, the best song may be the two-minute instrumental “Aileron.”

Attention Please really does deserve some of your closer attention. Please kill me.