This is the first instalment of MP3 Archaeology: a series in which we unearth underrated underground music of the Internet ages, talk about why they rule, and situate them into contexts, subcultures, and narratives they are a part of. The first release of this series is the self-titled debut EP from UK group Summerhouse, which was released on March 28, 2016. In this piece, we’ll talk about the EP, the 2010s punk to shoegaze/dream pop pipeline, and how blog-like Youtube channels have served as a gateway to left-of-centre music discovery for many people, myself included.
Once a genre comes on the scene and is established, discussion between fans and critics often looks to divide up its progression into various smaller movements, revivals, or waves. And while less often discussed, especially by fools that incorrectly believe that nothing of merit has come out of the scene since Loveless in 1991, shoegaze has also seen stages and trends that have shaped it’s trajectory.
in the early to mid 2010s, there was a sizable influx of bands once rooted in punk who began trading in power cords for major 7ths and removing some of the raw intensity for a dreamier sound. While the sparks for the punk to shoegaze/dream pop pipeline extend back into the 90s through the atmospheric yet heavy sounds of groups like Hum, Failure, Coaltars of the Deepers and Deftones, things really took off in the 2010s. Nothing’s Guilty of Everything, Title Fight’s Hyperview, Turnover’s Peripheral Vision, and Narrow Head’s Far Removed are a handful of key releases by bands who were either playing punk rock or had members playing in punk bands only a couple years prior. And while many earlier shoegaze groups played with heavier sounds and looked to create intensely emotional songs, perhaps one of the dominant motifs of 2010s shoegaze and dream pop was how groups like those listed above brought that prior sense of heaviness into this swirly sound while wearing their hearts on their sleeves in ways more obvious than those influenced more straightforwardly by older members of the gaze guard. Be it in the guitars and/or the emo-inspired songwriting, these records had a distinct heaviness, and a sense of masculinity either looking to escape from or teetering on the edge of bro-ishness, that isn’t often found in the more androgynous and ethereal earlier days of shoegaze. For the fans entrenched in the punk/emo adjacent scenes who kept an ear tuned to labels like Run for Cover, hearing a song like Title Fight’s “Head in the Ceiling Fan”, Turnover’s “Cutting My Fingers Off”, or Citizen’s “How Does It Feel” serves as very different sounding entry point to the shoegaze/dream pop sound than My Bloody Valentine’s “To Here Knows When”, Cocteau Twins’ “Cherry-Coloured Funk”, or Slowdive’s “Alison”.
It didn’t take long after its initial rush for the punk to shoegaze pipeline to emit its second stream of bands striking balances between heavy energy and freefloating atmospherics, and the Summerhouse EP would be one of the first releases of this second wave. In fact, during an interview, the band note Title Fight and legendary 90’s emo band Mineral as influences. Inspiration from the former materializes in the thick guitar tones, while some cathartic vocal passages recall the explosive moments of the latter’s The Power of Failing album. The Cure are also noted as a source of inspiration, and this is most exemplified by a grandiose Disintegration-like emphasis of atmosphere through the EP. It is established from the onset with “II”, where guitars ring out in slow succession to paint a gold sky veiled in patches by translucent wisps of cloud. The only thing providing any grounding to what would otherwise be a gorgeous piece of guitar ambient are the drums, which remain a propulsive and punchy force through the rest of the tracklist. If I am to compare the EP to the task of putting a puzzle together, “II” is grabbing the edge pieces from the pile set off to the side of the table and proceeding to construct the entirety of the perimeter. While this takes a little bit of time to slowly to come together, the task is completed by the end of the track for “Chlorine” to immediately slam the rest of those inner pieces into place.
Here in track 2, we have the band configured in full force. Dense guitar chords in excessive but not overindulgent amounts of chorus, reverb, and dirt swoon around drums that strike with authority. And in what will be a surprise to those expecting a subdued coo or murmur on the mic, the vocals pop out and carry the melody with vibrancy coming from a lead supported by a couple subtler voices a little deeper in mix. In the back half, after teasing it the first time through, the band shows of their first display of theatrical explosions into cathartic climaxes as the refrain of “Memmmmmoorrrrrrayyyyyyyyyy, just a distant – Memmmmmoorrrrrrayyyyyyyyyy” rings out and begs to be shouted along to.
The band taps into this gang vocal catharsis again on the back half of “Amber Glow”. I admire their versatility of the vocals on the release, in how they burst out for these hooky passages and at other times fuse into the ethereal nature of the mix to create texture and carry a melody between the rippling guitar chords. With a close ear, you can even detect some harsh vocals haunting the background of “Ether.” It’s the most traditionally shoegaze of the tracks, slower in pace instrumentally and through the elongated syllables of the singing, with an atmosphere equally conveying heavy downward crush and blissful heavenward soar.
It’s the closing track, “Haunt,” that displays the most punk-like energy with an urgent tempo commanded by the drums through the first half. The hurried nature of the instrumentation is contrasted again by a drawn out vocal delivery with a distinct paranoid feeling emitted through the words subsumed in a blur of reverb. It ties the bow on the story being told throughout the EP, as the band explained in an interview that the release is thematically about “dealing with certain things that happen that are completely out of your power and overcoming them – as well as touching on themes of reoccurring night terrors, which sort of ties the whole thing together.”
They finish things of again by opening into a colossal crescendo of wide open space where free-floating riffs twirl around the drums in a dizzy haze before wandering into silence.
It’s a solid, concise release and one of my favourite EPs in general. No follow-up release has came from the group, and their being inactive on social media since 2018 leads me to think that it might be the only thing we ever hear from them.
In the context of 20110s shoegaze/dream pop, this release is a mere blip overshadowed by several more popular and acclaimed records. Specifically in this space where punk energy, emo sensibility and ethereal noise collided, other releases like Alien Boy’s Sleeping Lessons, Great Death’s New Hell, and Pity Sex’s White Hot Moon would receive greater acclaim and fanfare than Summerhouse. And so you might ask, “Why are you highlighting this EP?”
Aside from it being really good, this EP helped kick-start a major step in the evolution of my music fandom, and I found it in a place where a lot of other people were getting their first exposure to new and exciting sounds.
Sometimes you don’t know that something exists until you come across it on the internet. In the case of Summerhouse, “Haunt”, the first song of theirs that I had heard, also happens the first song I heard that could be primarily classified as shoegaze. It’s funny now when I think back to my first impression of this song, because my initial thought was “oh this is cool, I really like the instrumentation but it’s kind of difficult to make out the vocals.” Little did I know that this was very much an intentional choice by the artist, since at the time I was someone whose prior music experience had consisted of exploring genres that had prominent vocals or none at all. It had not occurred to me that this binary could be broken to situate the voice and lyrics into this abstract space in between. Years later, I’m a point where I’ve heard enough of this stuff to know that there’s no such thing as too much reverb on a vocal track, and I find every stupid iteration of the “Bro wtf are Cocteau Twins saying” meme hilarious regardless how many times I see the joke get made. But I did not go in this style of music knowing what to expect, nor did I start with the heavy hitters that defined the characteristics of its sound, because it was not something I sought out intentionally. This had a lot to do with the way that I was discovering music at the time, which was via music “blogs” on Youtube.
These “blogs” that I speak of are a type of channel in which users upload new songs made by other people, seemingly intended to shine a light on to up and coming artists rather than making music made by an established artist available on the platform. The content of these uploads is usually as simple as the song’s audio and cover art, while others curate their own visual aesthetic with self-made videos or photography. There may be the tiniest little review or commentary by the uploader in the video’s description box, but generally the purpose seems to merely be the presentation of songs that fit in with the channel’s aesthetic to an audience of subscribers with similar music tastes. And for many young people with a lot of free time and internet access, these kinds of channels played a key role in expanding the scope of the music I listened.
In 2012-2013, during in my last year of high school, I began to make the transition from being a passive and casual music listener to becoming a rabid music fan actively seeking out new music. Previously, my music discovery process consisted of hearing songs on FM radio, TV, and in dressing rooms at hockey rinks. In grade 12, one of my friends got a car that came with a subscription to satellite radio. I would often catch a ride with him on the way to or from school, and he usually had the AltNation station on. While the FM alternative rock station I normally listened to was more often playing music from legacy acts like Weezer, Nirvana, and Our Lady Peace, AltNation played much more newer music made by artists I had not yet been exposed to. It seemed to act as a testing ground for bands before they made their way to the FM airwaves, as this was where I first heard the music of groups like Alt J, The 1975, and The Neighborhood only a few months before they would have huge hits on the alternative charts. To hear more from the artists I was hearing and find similar ones, I had to take to the Internet. On YouTube, I would look up songs I heard on the station. From there, I would listen to other ones by the band or tracks by other artists that popped up in the related videos section.
By reading comments, I would come to learn that a lot of the music I was discovering and enjoying could be classified under the umbrella of indie, or as some of my other less musically-engaged friends would call it when I showed them these songs: “hipster music”. In fact, I recall typing the words hipster music into the search bar to see what would come up. If only I knew then what a cliché poseur I was.
The first result was a channel called SoundHipster, and it really couldn’t have been more on the nose. The profile picture was of a small boy with those big black thick-rimmed glasses (you know the ones) and they posted a lot of well-produced, and probably major label-backed, acoustic folksy songs and pop tunes that incorporated synths and those clean and gleaming guitar tones that one might expect from the likes of The xx or Two Door Cinema Club. I was enjoying a lot of what I was hearing, but the channel got taken down numerous times because of copyright flags, so I had to head back to the search bar to look for more indie music.
Eventually I would find more channels and continued to broaden the scope of what I was hearing. If I found one and liked some of the songs they uploaded, then I would subscribe, trusting in that they would continue to put me onto new groups that I would enjoy. It was on a channel called kegz, uploading mostly lo-fi indie rock, where I first heard Summerhouse’s “Haunt.”
I was far from the only person doing this, as many these channels have thousands of subscribers. Not only was it a good way to discover music, but it also was a good avenue through which artists could grow their fanbase. These channels would often take submissions and each upload would include links to that band’s Bandcamp page and social media accounts. Often these artists would pop into the comment section of their songs to direct traffic to their own YouTube channel and chat with other commenters. I did not have a Tumblr phase, and I was not online during the heyday of Myspace and mp3 blogs, but these YouTube accounts and the comment sections of their uploads serving as the spot for discovery and community-building that many listeners, writers, and musicians found in those other online spaces that existed concurrently or prior to this era.
Kegz, Bedroom Fidelity, and TheLazyLazyMe turned me onto bedroom pop and lo-fi indie. Indie Music Nation and David Dean Burkhart got me acquainted with dream pop and post-punk. Majestic Casual and Haus of Whaps introduced me to alt-R&B and chillwave. I would learn these subgenre names when people asking about them would be answered in the comments section. I remember finding out that a song was vaporwave and at the time thinking that was such a crazy name for a genre. But it was also very exciting, because it suggested that there was so much more out there beyond the confines of the homogenized presentations of rock, pop, alternative, and country I heard on FM radio. That local station that claimed to play “everything” was lying. Sure, a playlist containing Kardinal Offishall, Nirvana, Beyonce, and Tegan and Sara is fairly broad, but they sure as hell weren’t going to play any slowcore, cloud rap, or witch house. But I didn’t need them to, because the YouTube crowd had given me a set of keys to this underground music utopia.
I don’t rely on these channels for music discovery as much as I used to, but occasionally I like to revisit those old channels to see what’s happening in those old haunts I once frequented.
Nowadays, they operate at varying levels of activity. Haus of Whaps hasn’t posted in five years. Kegz still uploads, albeit a little less frequently, and Bedroom Fidelity is still very active. User traffic on these channels seems to have gone down from where they were half a decade ago, likely due to the emergence of an ever-growing ocean of accounts, websites, apps, and other sources of online noise clamouring for the attention of internet users. Specific to music discovery, the growing rise of streaming services and their daily mixes and other algorithmically-sourced and user-created playlists have eliminated the need for many to leave the app to find new music.
I see in the blog channels of yesterday, and the ones that are still going on, a user generated community one only facilitated in the barest of minimums by the platform itself. YouTube and really any social media site, forum, whatever is largely just a blank canvas for creators, curators, and curious internet cruisers to do what they want with it. Through the voluntary labour (appropriated by the platform for financial gain, but I’ll save that for another discussion) of music creation and subsequent commentary and interaction, a community is built around these songs that are shared. Whether you are an active productive participant or a passive lurker; on indie blog Youtube, Stan Twitter, or music meme Instagram; it feels good to find pockets of people online who are into the same music as you are.
For a kid who grew in a small town without a peer group tapped into music from the indie and underground spheres, it was a bunch of strangers on a video-sharing website who pointed me towards worlds of sounds I didn’t know existed. Summerhouse, being the first shoegaze group I heard, demonstrated to me that guitars could be coated in effects and played in a way to concoct textures and a sense of atmosphere with little emphasis played on virtuosity. Vocals didn’t need to be the most prominent thing in the mix and in some cases work better blended into a melodic haze of instrumentation. My discovery and enjoyment of Summerhouse foreshadowed my future fandom of shoegaze artists like Majesty Crush, A.R. Kane, and Astrobrite. I’d also consider it a precursor to my enjoyment of other genres in which texture, atmosphere, and soundscapes are evenly prioritized with or take precedence over melodic songwriting; such as dub techno, deconstructed club, and noise and ambient music. Perhaps Summerhouse didn’t revolutionize the musical landscape as we know it, but it was one that opened my ears to listen to things in a new light.
There are a few other songs, bands, and release that I recall having a major impact on the shifting directions of my musical fandom, and I’ll probably write about those in the future. What’s one artist or release that played a big part in your coming-of-age story as a music fan?