(Indie Rock, Shoegaze) All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors - Turning Into Small - 1998, MP3, 192 kbps

Some overzealous critics might describe All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors as a cross between My Bloody Valentine and Stereolab. Vertigo-inducing swirls of guitars and keys, beautiful indie pop sensibilities, choral vocal polyphonies and krautrock electronic experimentation create the mood. The overall effect is of shimmering beauty that subtly changes just like sunlit reflections with ethereal dreaminess. All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors makes a point of questioning the way things are conventionally done in music. With a sound that is equal parts head music, indie, space rock, and new wave.

If you're not comparing them to My Bloody Valentine, you're not being honest, but the good news is that these New Jersey shoegazers compare quite favorably. The guitars and keyboards coalesce into surging balls of texture, vocals appropriately buried and incomprehensible, but catchy nonetheless. The guitars of "Your Imagination" smear and quiver in a cavern of reverb, "Puzzled Into Pieces" checks the band into a rest home for malfunctioning robots, "In Between and After" grooves through massive clouds of twitchy synth and melodic Moog lines, and "Snowflake Eye" casts male/female harmonies into a tangled forest of ominous synths and earth-shaking drums. The songs thicken and thin hypnotically, building to overwhelming climaxes, and the whole album has the effect of a riptide, pulling you under and dragging you into its violently beautiful world. The only better stateside shoegaze album I can even think of is 7% Solution's All About Satellites & Spaceships. - Joe Tangari (Pitchfork)