Record Review #1 - The Meeting Places

This is sort of a test post.  About 10 years ago, I had a brief work stint at a now-defunct major record label in NYC.  I made some great friends in my short time there, and a couple of us had the idea of starting our own blog.  Sadly, it never really got off the ground.  This is the one review I wrote for that blog.  I've edited it a bit from the original.

The Meeting Places - "Find Yourself Along the Way"
 (Words On Music, 2003)

To the majority of the music-buying public today, music is nothing more than just another commodity - something you have on in the background as you clean the house or do yoga.  There's a great sadness in that, though.  Great music is meant to be absorbed, to be allowed to penetrate the deepest reaches of your subconcious.  It should be one of the most potent drugs on earth.  Not enough people find the time to just stop, put on a set of headphones, and let a record take you somewhere else all together.  It is the ultimate high.

The short-lived dream pop and shoegaze genres project that experience as virtually no genre since has been able to, with droning guitars, shimmering soundscapes and breathy vocals that are the staple traits of those genres.  In their heyday, during the late 80s and early 90s, The Jesus & Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Chapterhouse, Spiritualized and many others gave birth to "the scene that celebrated itself".

The genre was virtually cast aside with the onset of Brit-pop and Grunge, but left in its wake were dozens of amazing artists with scores of records that still cry out to be heard today.  Those records are too many to list, but easy enough to find.  I encourage you to do so.

I discovered L.A.'s The Meeting Places listening to a dream pop webcast.  I was very surprised to hear a modern band sound like this, as I had no idea shoegaze was still a "thing" anywhere, let alone America.  When I first heard "Freeze Our Stares", I literally did freeze in place.  I hadn't heard something like this from any band in quite some time  "Stares" opens the album and immediately brings you to that place of comfortable numbness, where external senses shut off and the brain yearns to take a journey walking the fine line that separates music and noise that all shoegaze artists walked.  Even the more rock-like numbers, such as "Blur the Lines" and "On Our Own", induce chills with ethereal melodies reminiscent of Lush's "Gala" compilation.  "Take to the Sun" begins as a slow, sweeping number that erupts halfway-through into an explosion of drone and feedback that is incredibly reminiscent of MBV's Loveless album.

Wholly engaging and beautifully crafted, "Find Yourself Along the Way" is a gem that shouldn't be missed by anyone, nor should the records that influenced it.