Swirlies
They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days in the Glittering World of the Salons

There was a period around the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018 when I met a few musicians, really talented people, much more talented than I am, which gave me inferiority complexes, but well, that's another story. The fact is, even in the type of music I was listening to, I felt like a ignoramus who only listened to mainstream stuff, which, mind you, I still find beautiful, but this made me realize that I was only at the tip of an iceberg and needed to go deeper, absolutely. Of course, to dig deeper, I started from the period that had most influenced my music tastes at the time, the '90s. And so, between YouTube and review sites, I found many gems, and in my opinion, one of these is precisely They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days in the Glittering World of the Salons. Yes, it's a very long title but also evocative in its own way.

I must say that in being very selective, this album was quite a love at first sight for me, it instantly took me back to the '90s, that sound mixture between shoegaze and noise but at the same time accessible, even to someone like me who up until then hadn't delved much into these genres and even found the beautiful Loveless by My Bloody Valentine a bit difficult.

So as mentioned, there's always a shoegaze guitar in the foreground doing its own thing and writhing within the very variable structures of the songs, while still maintaining a certain composure, often supported by drum machines and lo-fi sounding synthesizers. At other times, it feels like you're facing a puzzle of sounds, as if they were different recordings pieced together. The vocals may not be the focal point of the album, but the lyrics manage to be expressive and communicate a lot with few words, especially in the snippets of puzzle pieces I mentioned earlier.

It's probably not an innovative album for the years it was released, although it does offer some good insights, but certainly, it's a good record that, listening to it today, manages to be a great nostalgia operation, perhaps even for those who never lived through those years or were too young like me.