One Two Let Me Go

No Joy / Sonic Boom “Obsession”

Brian Eno famously described My Bloody Valentine’s “To Here Knows When” as “the vaguest music ever to have been a hit” in the United Kingdom. I love this description, and wish that shoegaze – a meaningless and derisive genre term from the U.K. press – could instead simply be called “vague music.” (Or, if you absolutely must, vaguewave.) Vagueness is more central to this sort of music than the implied shyness of the shoegaze term – it’s music about foregrounding accompaniment but keeping vocals for purely textural and emotional reasons. It’s music about expressing sensation and feelings that would not be adequately serviced by words but still need a vocal presence.

No Joy’s Jasamine White-Gluz is her generation’s finest artist working in this milieu, and over the course of the past three years has zoomed beyond solid entry-level shoegaze rock to master textural juxtapositions and dramatically improve her craft as a writer of melodies and harmonies. No Joy’s 2015 album More Faithful is the breakthrough masterpiece, but her EPs since then have pushed her aesthetic to different extremes – more aggro, more pop, more meditative, more electronic.

Her new collaboration with Sonic Boom is her most far-out experiment yet, with the lead track “Obsession” starting off in a sort of “Blue Monday”-ish indie house music zone before drifting out into a more ambient phase that reminds me of Terry Riley. This music is vague, oh so beautifully vague! The song often sounds like a remix of some other more straightforward tune, with White-Gluz’s vocal parts sounding like they’re just snippets from verses and choruses pasted together into something new. There’s an implication of form and feeling, but that’s about all you really get. The song almost completely dissolves just before the 7 minute mark but then comes back to the original groove, which is somehow both a huge payoff and incredibly disorienting.

Buy it from Bandcamp.