By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring Our Girl’s quirked up Britpop-adjacent rocker THE GOOD KIND and Mo Dotti’s year best shoegaze outing OPAQUE!
Our Girl – THE GOOD KIND
Genre: Alternative Rock
Favorite Tracks: “What You Told Me,” “Something About Me Being A Woman,” “I Don’t Mind”
London indie rock trio Our Girl return with the autumnal THE GOOD KIND, an album that embodies the melancholic season down to its hazelly artwork and pensive tonality. While their 2018 debut STRANGER TODAY featured rapturous guitars like heartfelt alt-rock bands Wednesday and Speedy Ortiz, THE GOOD KIND is more restrained. The few blasts of guitar that do appear help make the album’s bittersweet and jangly melodies feel all the more sentimental. This release contains the kind of soft, cozy Britpop-adjacent rock of a bygone era, where such a soft palette helps lead one away from going through the motions.
Throughout its runtime, THE GOOD KIND carries a consoling, nostalgic tenderness. The onset of this comfort emerges on “It’ll Be Fine,” combining acoustic finger-plucking with vocalist Soph Nathan’s subdued voice above a string-laden backdrop. “What You Told Me” leans into musical trepidation with its shoegazing guitar solos, while the titular track “The Good Kind” steers this notion in a more easy-going direction. The latter song was notably composed with Warpaint’s drummer Stella Mozgawa. “Something About Me Being A Woman” and “Relief” stand out for their introspective lyricism, with the former particularly shining for its confrontational lines converging with whirring guitar strumming: “You think I’m caring and you like that / So you said some things you shouldn’t have / It’s got nothing to do with me though.” As THE GOOD KIND winds down during its final third, the album cements itself as a vigorous means to navigate everyday troubles wearing you down. Listen to Our Girl’s pleasant new album on Bandcamp. [Dom Lepore].
Mo Dotti – OPAQUE
Genre: Shoegaze
Favorite Tracks: “lucky boy,” “really wish,” “dead to me”
The last two days have seen too much discourse about shoegaze. Is it lazy and derivative? Is it fascist? No doubt these are insane fall of Rome takes from the app formerly known as Twitter—brain rot of the highest order. But it was kind of amazing to literally be listening to Mo Dotti as those takes were being fired off. I’ve had notes jotted down for this Bandcamp Pick of OPAQUE for the better part of two months, and it had words like “muscular” and “grinding” and “sharp” and “angelic” and “euphoric” and a host of other commonly used flowery prose to describe OPAQUE jotted down because, well, it’s probably the year’s best and least talked about shoegaze album. From the cavernous whirring of opener “pale blue afternoon” down to the noodling guitar fuzz of closer “dead to me,” it feels focused and considered in every detail—the work of a long lost ‘90s band on Creation.
But I can’t get past this idea of the genre—or really any emerging shoegaze band—being fascist. Make no doubt: Mo Dotti’s dazzling debut sounds as meticulous and polished as it does because they put in the time playing it locally. While the band’s first recorded material was 2020’s fuzzy, self-assured EP BLURRING, their origins date back to mid 2010s, playing gigs at house shows or now lost venues like the Hi Hat or the Bootleg, frequently appearing on Ron Lynch’s famed Tomorrow! show and putting in 10,000 hours. It reminds me of Soft Blue Shimmer, another dreamy Los Angeles pop band who have been on a similar trajectory and whose early material immediately connected like a pillowy buzzsaw—the polished product of just putting your nose to the grindstone live. “It’s hard, and you’re competing with a lot of other bands here. It’s either all-ages in a shitty venue or it’s 21+ in a 400-cap venue, and it’s hard to break in” Soft Blue Shimmer told me back in 2020. When the local scene we’re discussing is somewhere as big, disconnected, and unfocused as L.A., many of the regular rules don’t apply. But the proof is in the final product.
Hearing OPAQUE is hearing that still slow moving progression on full display; every spellbinding chorus, tranquil coo, and gripping guitar solo is rooted in a local scene in some way. It’s in developing and honing the sound the old fashioned way, to rooms of 20 people and on the first of four support slots. If we’re going to combat fascism in the coming years, it will be on the ground and in your community—that same community Mo Dotti has been playing to for years. Support them and support your local scene. Grab a copy of OPAQUE, one of the years best albums, on Bandcamp today. [CJ Simonson]
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