Moose - Suzanne
It’s a curious truth of the genre that the band who inspired the term shoegazing itself didn’t actually sound all that much like most of the bands who would later come to be most associated with it.
For a time Moose were scruffy and lo-fi, but with the release of their first full album, …XYZ in 1992, they were mining a seam of country-tinged pop, even covering Fred Neil’s old classic Everybody’s Talking. Reverb and feedback are using sparingly and melodically, and the album coasts by with unhurried simplicity.
With each successive album, Moose left shoegazing further behind them, so you have to go back to their early EPs to find the source of their association with the genre. First appearing on the Cool Breeze EP, and then the US release Sonny & Sam, Suzanne is a glimpse of Moose’s melodic future, buried under six feet of dirt, seen through a dirty windowpane; within its own three minute life-cycle, even, it charts the course of its creators, gradually opening up, blossoming into something glorious, before fading, disappearing all too soon.