Lilys
In the Presence of Nothing

I find myself, to my dismay, shoegaze metalhead.

[Skip this paragraph if you're here, rightly so, just to read about the Lillys' album]

I'm listening to Sway, the new album by what I think are the leading figures of the contemporary US scene - but beware that the USA is not the world, and out there in the world are girls and guys like Echo Lake, who deserve great attention - and I find there the eight paccheri of sound and distortion that are absolutely pleasant and that I thought I would find. Well, that would be enough. But then the brain movement comes out, as always, forcing me to reflect on why something that seems to have everything, but really everything it takes to enchant a fuzz/tremolo/reverse-addicted ends up staying there pretty-but-I-don’t-know and above all - very dangerously - pretty-but-it-was-all-better-before. Now, the "when he was around, trains used to fly" is not really my case, nor yours, also because Kevin Shields is still here, and he, godmothers and godfathers are the immanence; they are past, present and future of shoegaze - and MBV, last year, reminded us of it. So, while it's certified that Shields is the embodied attitude, he is the spirit of the genre made man and at the same time its -core, the suspicion arises that Nick Bassett - but I’m not saying this to make comparisons, heaven forbid - the man inside and behind Whirr, despite his efforts amidst unimportant controversies and catchy phrases to appear trve or roots or -core or random nonsense, is fundamentally an internet rookie with a fixation on noise. A rookie who so far had been good - even excellent - and diligent within the genre boundaries, but in trying to get out of it, to seek his own attitude, has only revealed a monstrous lack of inspiration and a notable penchant for being a poseur. Let's remember that Bassett also plays in Nothing, whose debut, also released this year - pretty and all - suffers exactly from the same ailment as Sway: and it’s obvious, because they sound the same. Let’s also remember that Bassett played in Deafheaven, who in the humble opinion of the writer are practically a pose sprinkled with guitars. Anyway, I check my phone and the background is still the cover of Loveless, but by now I don’t even realize it; more than my Linus safety blanket, it’s my Manowar t-shirt: I wear it out of an unconditioned reflex and for a sense of belonging that goes beyond awareness and beyond the natural disdain for any attitude even vaguely scenester, any ostentation and pose. I don't feel like the girl I know, who alternates without grace, depending on the club, little Hogan shoes and Vuitton bag given by her mommy with Ramones sleeveless tops, and I think it happened to her to change clothes in telephone booths or the like in the course of a night, like a superwoman of foolishness. I feel instead like the guy I met at a wedding who was wearing his Manowar t-shirt, just; he was wearing it, not flaunting it as is often written out of synonymic ineptitude. Because it’s right and natural that way, and the space-time context, in these cases, stands at zero.

Among talks around pose and attitude, controversies, fights, beatdowns, rigid orthodoxies, semi-nostalgia and a suddenly prominent sense of belonging, I am a shoegaze metalhead. I remember fondly, by the way, when a friend informed me of Ronnie James Dio's death, and I, kidding around, said something like "ah, finally"; to which he, dead serious, replied: "but you know depending on where you say it they'll stab you?". So let's get this straight, I don't think I would stab someone just for a "Bilinda Butcher is a slut" said casually, yet since that day I go out very little and talk to no one.

[Instead skip the following paragraphs if you weren’t actually interested in the Lillys’ album, and maybe go back to the first paragraph if you felt like reading something about the new Whirr]

In the Lillys' album, there's primarily a lot of suffering dressed as electronic elegance.

No, just kidding.

The overly long preface - and I apologize - was more or less necessary, because Kurt Heasley and his Lilys were often dismissed as Lovelessian emulators full stop. It's true: probably because at the beginning and eager for immediate identification, between quotes and evident references, the Lilys put their own spin to fuel the prejudice; it's also beyond doubt that we're talking about the most similar album to Loveless ever recorded - the argument stands almost entirely in the attack of Tone Bender - even more than MBV itself, at times. But here the temporal context matters, indeed, because In the Presence of Nothing was released in nineteen ninety-two, just a year after Loveless. No one denies the influence of the My Bloody Valentine album, nor that of the EPs and LPs that preceded it, but it would be unfair not to consider the fact that Heasley might have been nourished by the same vibrations as Shields, although from the other side of the Atlantic, and although mediated by the sound waves of the illustrious progenitor: very C86 vibes, among other things. Therefore, we find songs, riffs, ideas, that make us think of noise as one component of a complex creative process, graced by inspiration; inspiration that goes far beyond compulsively buying pedals and trying to play things buried under the chaos: the argument stands almost entirely in the irresistible refrain of Claire Hates Me, marvelous. And even when the sound is only a function of itself and it frees itself from the form, in the imperious mysticism of the twelve instrumental minutes of The Way the Snowflakes Fall, we feel vital sap emanating from every tom strike, and the reverse bass-reverberated carpet, slides, harmonics and arcane guitar distortions seem to anticipate by a year the spirit of the masterpiece Flying Saucer Attack. Still traceable are post-punk traces in the martial bass of Periscope, that emerges from an ocean of Holy Grail - or similar - to burst into a twee-pop that would have fit perfectly in the aforementioned NME compilation; and once again the enveloping and trembling hum of the guitar on Elizabeth Color Wheel, perhaps the best piece, which incorporates all the shoegaze archetypes and pushes them towards peaks of expressiveness rarely matched. Whispered vocal harmonies - the most typical: male and female vocals - synth carpets peek through at times from thick layers of the usual overlapping guitar-ambience and canonical rhythm - canonical but always extraordinarily sharp: an overlap that gives rise to clear, visionary explosions of creativity, like in the colorful fireworks at the conclusion of Collider.

Not at all in controversy with the new for the new - easy irony on metalhead conservatism aside - but disheartened by so many exercises in style and manifestations of empty practice, I return to the roots and fetch this classic: partly to rehabilitate it and remember it; partly because I think for those who will have had the patience to read to the end of this enormous two-handed masturbation spiel - in other words, a fellow compulsive like me - besides myself, In the Presence of Nothing can be a faithful companion and a constant source of inspiration.