11.30.2014 — “Rosie” by Tuques

If you only listen to one song today, make it “Rosie” by Tuques (2014, from the Slushpuppie EP).

Tuques is a shoegaze/noise pop/dream pop quartet from Edmonton. They put out a really great EP this October via the Edmonton-based cassette-only label Phởk-ing Tapes.

I don’t know anything at all about this band. I learned about their EP while I was snooping around the outstanding Sounds Better With Reverb site. I’ve seen this EP mentioned on a couple of other shoegaze-centric sites, and as soon as I took a listen, I liked it.

There’s a little bit of lo-fi grittiness to this entire EP, a lot of tape hiss. It sounds a little bit like it might have been recorded through the on-board tape recorder on a boom box. Like the magnificent All Hail West Texas by The Mountain Goats. That’s probably not the case, but it certainly is the case that they didn’t have loads of posh studio gear at their disposal. Nonetheless, it’s gloriously noisy in all the right ways. Feedback and fuzz and delay. It’s a very good EP, and I’ll hope that there’s more to come from this young band.

There’s only six songs on this EP, and they’re all great. Even while I was writing this post, I changed my mind three times which song to feature, and I finally settled on this.

“Rosie” by Tuques

Right from the drop, there’s no mistaking what’s going on here. A squall of feedback and we’re immediately hit with a heavy wave of fuzzy guitars. Airy delay-laden vocals? Check.

Something about this song reminds me in a very general way of one of the finest and most unsung examples of mid-1990s American shoegaze. The Drop Nineteens.

In the second half of the song, it gets a bit quiet for a few seconds, and I love that moment that comes at about 2:58. After the big burst of feedback, the heavy wave comes again. But it’s all so much bigger here than it was at the opening of the song. Almost impossibly big. Hard to breathe. I can imagine this is something to behold as a live song. I’ve just listened through headphones again and again, and I suggest that you do the same.

You can download the Slushpuppie EP by naming your own price here.