Virgins – nothing hurt and everything was beautiful
A technicolour wash of sound, Virgin's debut album revives the sleeping shoegaze giant for a modern audience.
In the early 90s, ‘‘shoegaze’’ was coined as a media slur for musicians of the alt-rock persuasion with more enamour for their effect pedals than their audience. A style of music too ethereal to be alt-rock and yet too alt-rock to be dream pop, the media was stumped. They would soon learn that the beauty of shoegaze — and we say the term now without any derogatory connotation — is in its otherworldliness anchored to solid ground. It's undefinable yet we recognise shoegaze as......
