Lightfoils

These here are when I first saw them at Darkroom I think at some festival Scary Lady Sarah had.
I would post pictures of the rest of the band but Ms Nicole here is much too pretty.




The Empty Bottle had a Free Monday this 13th February. Unicycle Loves You and Lightfoils both releasing new music on that day. Unicycle I shall write on a separate post. I'm somewhat more familiar with Lightfoils as I have seen them twice before. They are in that oddly woven web of local shoegaze that includes Rosen Association, Panda Riot, architecture, and the now defunct bliss.city.east. I just noticed while researching what other names come up in relation to Lightfoils. It's an active point on the local constellation. But also this pantheon I personally listen to. I've seen around casually. It's important to note how the shoegaze tag holds. Cory who plays bass is way cool. It's also that local thing.

Nationally, if you are into WarPaint (L.A., Echo Park) and School Of Seven Bells (Brooklyn) and cannot get enough, tighten your focus on the Midwest, and Lightfoils is one to discover. I think they will be touring. I was too broke at the time to buy their CD so my impressions will be based on what you can hear on their facebook page, and barely catching the Monday gig. They will be re-releasing the EP on Saint Marie Records. You can still see Lightfoils in the small clubs, and they are going to SXSW. The band is relatively young, since 2010. But individual members are veteran musicians....like Cory. It's just far easier to write about the band when you have the CD but I couldn't wait for that.

It fascinates me to no end that living somewhere else I don't get that immediate direct exposure of this music. ......Oh yes, I was going on about Lightfoils. Off the top of my head the two songs on the facebook page remind me of the Projekt band Mira only with less of that brooding weight. That works well for Mira, and I listen to them a lot but I don't listen to Lightfoils because I need to be pulled out of a meandering fog. The landscape they map is in the clouds.

On that Free Monday they played like it was a weekend. There were so many local musicians in the audience at Empty Bottle it was like a local industry night. My Gold Mask, Walking Bicycles.....the Bottle is a major hub that casually brings in all kinds of local bands, all brilliant. Last Monday night was not a shoegaze theme night, and such named genres do not limit the bands to only play to a narrow audience. Calling Lightfoils shoegaze in no way limits their potential audience. Perhaps because the genre has a naturally occurring wider appeal...at least for me. Subcultures have this way of spicing up the music they claim as their own, a way of telegraphing what music may sound like in the future. They are the ones to hold the fort down while you off following your inconstant fancy. They are....we are the ones who give you that funny look when you put shoegaze and comeback in the same sentence.

Kaspar-Zig