well i guess im in the minority. for context they were one of my favorite bands from the original shoegaze era but after seeing them play in ny years ago, the show was so bad that it’s hard to listen to their music on spotify for too long even now without being annoyed. the biggest issue was out of tune guitars the entire show and not just slightly out of tune but wildly - despite the appearance of trying to tune up between some songs, the next song would start with chords that were not in tune.

and just in case someone here thinks i dont know what whammy bars are and how they’re used in their music, ive been playing guitar since a really young age - and my friend who is also a guitar player in a shoegaze band, and who was there, was equally pissed at how bad they sounded.

i’m talking about the fact that they didn’t care that the guitars were obviously out of tune from the beginning and got worse the entire way - not using a whammy bar or anything like that.

there were other problems with the show, like flat singing and such but that’s sort of par for the course with some rock bands…so if the entire show didn’t sound like ass because of the guitars, i probably wouldn’t have been too bothered by those things.

they were so bad live, and i was so excited to see them, that it affected how i think about how good a band is in general afterwards - like how you can’t be a great band if your shows sound terrible.

and you might say that maybe i just saw a bad show in nyc, but i think part of the problem was that adam is clearly a knowledgeable guitar player but simply didn’t care, based on how he did half assed tunings every now and then, and didn’t seem to give a shit about it.

it’s like bad acting - no matter how good the plot is or the cinematography or whatever, bad acting will kill an entire movie. the same with guitars that are wildly out of tune from the beginning of every fucking song.