Following a pair of well-received EPs on the American label Prospect, the German shoegaze outfit
Jaguwar make their full-length debut with
Ringthing via Hamburg indie Tapete Records. The Dresden trio of singer/guitarist Lemmy Fischer, singer/bassist Oyèmi Noize, and drummer Christoph Krenkel apparently contacted Tapete hoping to garner a tour support slot for U.K. space rock heroes
the Telescopes, and in the process earned themselves a recording contract. Naming their LP after an Electro-Harmonix guitar pedal certainly telegraphs the massive smear of effected noise and ambient swirls that listeners can expect on these ten lengthy tracks. The templates laid out by genre forebears (and acknowledged influence)
My Bloody Valentine are immediately recognizable, though there are enough jangling melodic elements woven throughout to get a decent picture of who
Jaguwar are as songsmiths. Even with the vocals buried in the mix, tracks like "Gone" and "Night Out" show a nice sense of craft lurking underneath the dense aural weather patterns colliding atop them. The vocal duties on
Ringthing are pretty evenly split between Noize and Fischer, the former bringing a dulcet sweetness to the blend and the latter a twinge of emo ache. Occasionally veering into
Cure-like dream pop on songs like "Whales,"
Jaguwar definitely have a strong sense of the ebb-and-flow dynamics of their chosen stylistic cluster (shoegaze, dream pop, noise rock, etc.), ably delivering the tones, timbres, and sounds that draw listeners to this type of music. ~ Timothy Monger