We Are the Beautiful: Two Decades of Shoegaze sets itself a more ambitious task than most genre retrospectives. Recent indie guitar rock sets such as You’re No Big Deal: Grunge, the U.S. Underground and Beyond or This Can’t Be Today: American Psychedelia & The Paisley Underground have confined themselves to neat ten-year periods, reinforcing the familiar story that these scenes emerged, briefly flourished, and were then consumed by the commercial juggernauts of grunge and Britpop. By extending its scope across two decades, We Are the Beautiful argues instead that shoegaze did not simply die; it gradually dissolved into the wider vocabulary of alternative music.
The conventional history of shoegaze is well established. While the Paisley Underground revived the sounds of the 1960s, shoegaze developed a more contemporary approach to psychedelic music, drawing less upon classic rock than on post-punk experimentation. For a brief period, its dense wall of guitar sound rivalled American grunge as the defining alternative rock aesthetic of the early 1990s before Britpop altered the commercial landscape. Yet that narrative overlooks how thoroughly shoegaze’s production techniques permeated later alternative music. Its influence can be heard as readily on Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream or Oasis’ “Columbia” as on records that continue to be labelled shoegaze today.
We Are the Beautiful’s opening two CDs are less immediately rewarding than the later material, but they are important to the compilation’s historical argument. With My Bloody Valentine absent and solitary tracks from Slowdive, Ride and Lush representing shoegaze’s most influential bands, the collection necessarily relies upon lesser-known contemporaries to flesh out the story.
This means it cannot function as a definitive survey of the genre’s greatest achievements, but it does provide a broader picture of the scene surrounding those landmark records. The dominant lineage of the guitar experimentation and emotional restraint of post-punk can be heard in its widest range on Bleach’s “Burn”, which recalls Hüsker Dü’s collision of buzzing guitars and bubblegum melody, while Blind Mr. Jones’ “Eyes Wide” revisits the atmospheric directness of Joy Division beneath layers of chorus and reverb.
Shoegaze’s defining innovation was never compositional complexity but sound itself. Kevin Shields and Ride’s Andy Bell transformed the electric guitar into a source of overwhelming texture, often reducing harmonic movement to a secondary concern. The same production aesthetic also created space for a distinctive vocal approach. Where grunge prized confrontation and Britpop increasingly favoured swagger, singers such as Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell and Lush’s Miki Berenyi floated through the mix rather than competing with the guitars, their voices becoming another instrumental layer.
Across two discs, however, those qualities reveal their limitations. Dense guitars, buried vocals and economical songwriting gradually blur together in the absence of the movement’s greatest masterpieces. Listeners seeking the original scene at its finest will still find Loveless or Souvlaki more rewarding, but these recordings remain valuable as evidence of how widely the shoegaze aesthetic spread. Even the rhythm sections complicate the genre’s reputation for weightlessness: while some tracks adopt the dance-influenced drumming associated with My Bloody Valentine’s Colm Ó Cíosóig, others, such as Catherine Wheel’s “I Want to Touch You”, approach the physical force of grunge.
The compilation truly justifies its expanded scope on discs three and four. Rather than simply documenting a scene, these selections chart the migration of shoegaze’s sonic vocabulary across indie rock, trip hop, post-rock and electronica. Bowery Electric move toward trip hop without abandoning their guitar textures. All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors combine the Cardigans’ indie pop with shimmering drones. Andalusia pair Mazzy Star’s emotional stillness with shoegaze guitar tones. Asobi Seksu place those textures against Stereolab-like motorik rhythms, and Pluramon integrates them into late-1990s electronic music.
These later selections are not altogether faithful to the original aesthetic, but they are considerably more varied and engaging. They demonstrate that shoegaze was not simply a fixed genre but a collection of production ideas capable of reshaping a wide range of alternative music.
That broader perspective also creates the compilation’s central tension. By the fourth disc, the definition of shoegaze has become increasingly expansive. The walls of guitars remain as the clearest point of continuity, but cleaner, more conventionally mixed vocals gradually replace the submerged vocal aesthetic associated with Goswell and Berenyi. Some tracks feel closer to neo-psychedelic indie pop, post-rock or electronica than to shoegaze itself.
Anyone approaching We Are the Beautiful expecting four discs of uninterrupted immersive guitar haze may therefore come away surprised. This is not the definitive shoegaze anthology, nor does it attempt to replace the essential albums that established the genre. Its achievement is different: it captures the process by which a short-lived scene became a lasting musical vocabulary.
Like its companion compilations chronicling the Paisley Underground and the beginnings of grunge, We Are the Beautiful documents a moment before a style became absorbed into the mainstream. The difference is that its story continues beyond that point, showing that shoegaze’s legacy was not limited to a handful of landmark albums but extended through decades of alternative music. Uneven but consistently fascinating, it is a rewarding portrait of a genre whose influence proved far more durable than its moment in the limelight suggested.