Music:
Member Since: 3/18/2006
Band Members: Peter Bogolub~Mike Pecchio
Influences: my bloody valentine, ride, slowdive, rocketship, hawkwind, brian eno, polvo, french traditional bag pipe music (preferably marching), joy division,
Sounds Like: "Shimmer, baby, shimmer! Pete Bogolub makes no bones about what CDs have been in his record player for the past fifteen years or so on Any Day Ago, his debut release under the Sems nom-de-disque. A Brooklynite, Bogolub eschews the trendy post-punk-disco-dance-party revivalism his neighbors can't seem to get enough of for the pageantry of the shoegazer heyday of the late 1980's and early 90s. Back then, acts like A.R. Kane, the Boo Radleys, and Slowdive were getting listeners high on the sort of blissed-out, reverb heavy space-pop that informs much of Any Day Ago.
As you might expect, however, The Sems don't just revisit this sound for the sake of nostalgia; there's a new agenda here, one that owes as much to the intervening years as it does to those original kings of the early '90s British indie charts. That's why on songs like the excellent opener "A Lonely Place To Be" you'll detect a love for other, more recent acts like Velocity Girl and Stereolab that flesh out the sound a bit more, expanding things out in different directions. Perhaps the best song is the impossible to resist "Leaving Is Easy," which straddles the line between indie pop (handclaps and all) and shoegazer with perfect, delicate balance the way Moose did on their early singles in the '90s. You can tell a song is catchy as all get-out when you find yourself singing along and realize suddenly that there aren't more than a handful of words in the whole thing. Love is wonderful, but sometimes all you really need is a good set of "doot-doot-doo"s.
There's a lot of air here too, lots of open sonic pastures to graze around on, as well as a few tracks that shoot the gap like the sublime "A Pleasant Time." Like Matt Sharp's recent pastoral, ambient-flavored releases, Any Day Ago proves that Bogolub is a master of finding the soft spot between melody and rhythm and digging himself into a comfortable, weightless niche. It's pretty remarkable that this debut is the work of just one person, but in the end, that's almost irrelevant. If this were the product of a group proper, I wouldn't love it any less."
--ampcamp.com
Record Label: audraglint, recordhead (lunamusic)
Type of Label: Indie