Customer Reviews

After Years

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Never before have I really acted upon a one of Amazon's "New For You" suggestions and picked up a compact disc from a band I knew absolutely nothing about. But after searching for Lush, "After Years" got featured. Although in my mid-20's at the time that shoegazer groups were taking off in the late '80's and early '90's, I'd never heard of Secret Shine (though I owned releases from many of the pioneer bands, starting with My Bloody Valentines's "Isn't Anything"). I'm glad I took the time to click on the icon for this particular recording.

And now I want to beat myself severely about the head and shoulders, whale on my forehead, and box my own ears. How could I have missed this band? Most of the universal elements of standard shoegazing/dream-pop music populate each track - a massive wash of over-driven/ shimmering guitar, crisp percussion, dreamy vocals, and wistfully gorgeous melodies, yet while there's a temptation to compare them to Lush, Secret Shine has a warmth that seems to be lacking with the former band, and a dynamic tension to their music that only a few of their contemporaries (I'm thinking Pale Saints, specifically) could match, with each track leaving the listener more breathless than every one preceding it .

To tell the truth, I know that I missed this band because I'm an American, and this CD brings together EP's and unreleased material available only in Britain at the time. But now it's available here, on Amazon, and anyone with an abiding love for this kind of music should order a copy immediately, if not sooner.

This CD is a towering masterpiece of dream pop shimmer! Why Secret Shine were never appreciated as much as inferior bands like Lush were will always be beyond my understanding. The typical adjectives I often see used to describe other great shoegaze bands like "brilliant," "lovely," "transcendent," or "beautiful, ethereal melodies" just don't do justice to this CD. All I can say is that of almost all of the CDs I own, no CD is more deserving of the followig quote by Arthur Schopenhaeur than this one:

Music is "a universal language in the highest
sense, which has roughly the same relationship to
the universality of concepts as these have to
individual things... This intimate relationship
which music has to the true essence of all things
explains why, when appropriate music sounds in
any scene or action or event or environment, it
seems to open up to us its most secret meaning
and supplies the most accurate and intelligible
commentary upon it. For music is different from
all the other arts in the sense that it is not a
copy of the appearance or, more accurately, the
adequate objectivity of the Will but the
unconditional copy of the Will itself and,
therefore, to everything that is physical in the
world it is the metaphysical, to every appearance
it represents the essence. One could in
consequence just as well call the world embodied
music as embodied Will: hence it is
understandable why music throws every painting --
indeed every scene of actual life and the world --
into bold relief in heightened significance." -
Arthur Schopenhaeur, The World as Will and Idea