The last time I heard anything from Paper Moon was a couple of years ago, when the Winnipeg-based group released their debut, One Thousand Reasons To Stay, One Reason To Leave. They were just one of the many bright lights in the Endearing Records stable, alongside the likes of Julie Doiron, Novillero (now on Mint Records) and the Meligrove Band. They managed to score some success in Japan (now how come we don’t hear that cliche as much as we used to?) and a bunch of soundtrack spots for various television shows (now how come we… oh, wait, we hear that all the time) thanks to their upbeat, keyboard-fueled power pop. By all rights, I should’ve loved Paper Moon, just like the critics and the Canadian pop lovers did.

And yet, no. “Mercury Is Clearly Opposing Neptune” aside, One Thousand Reasons To Stay never stuck for me. Since then, there have been a couple of similar acts that have also failed recently to leave much of an impact: the Gay, Mates of State, A.C. Newman, Immaculate Machine, and even the New Pornographers’ Electric Version. If you were wondering why I never bothered to write anything about Twin Cinema, now you know why.

So now it’s 2006 and lo and behold, Paper Moon are back with Broken Hearts Break Faster Every Day. If nothing else, Paper Moon could retire now and make a living coming up with quirky titles for other bands; it’s clear from “Your Thesaurus Won’t Help You Now” and “Broken Hearts Break Faster Every Day” that Paper Moon have a knack for this sort of thing. But what about the music? I’ve only heard a couple of tracks, but the scouting report suggests the band has toned down the sugar. The arrangements are more refined and the keyboards no longer stand out so much; the high-octane giddiness of “Mercury Is Clearly Opposing Neptune” is gone, but so is material like the grating opening to “Sno-Globe,” a song I can never bear to listen to even though it commits no other grave errors. But what’s especially interesting to me is the band’s newfound embrace of minor chord progressions. “String of Blinking Lights” is a perfect example of the slight shift in approach; it feels more accomplished and hits with greater weight than anything off One Thousand Reasons To Stay.

The trade-off, of course, is that Paper Moon sound a bit more adult contemporary these days. But this is an approach that worked well for former Kindercore band Call and Response when taken to an extreme; there’s no reason why Paper Moon couldn’t use the same playbook.

One of the problems I’ve had with shoegazer material in the past is it’s so damned gauzy and indistinct at times that entire albums can fly by without much notice. A friend lent me the definitive album of the genre, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, and all I remember from an entire weekend of listening is what the cover looked like—a photo of something blurred beyond recognition into ghostly patterns of pink and purple. I remember liking a bunch of hooks throughout the album, melodies here and there, but can’t remember how any of them go. My Bloody Valentine, though they are less than two decades old, seem like a relic from far before my time, one of those monumental bands I will never be able to understand because I don’t have the requisite appreciation of the era to fully get the album’s sound. I imagine it’d be like giving a college graduate of 2012 a copy of Portishead’s Dummy. They’d appreciate the historical import but not so much the aesthetic contributions.

So I’ve never really dug into the original shoegazer scene, even as I continue to appreciate the work of those influenced by shoegazer without really knowing it. I even own a Lush album, though by the time of Lovelife Lush had all but ceased to be a shoegazer band. I loved Come Clean when it was first released by a resurgent Curve in 1998, showing the distant stepchildren like Garbage how it was supposed to be done. But with the story of their first incarnation nothing more than a good lede for an article or a couple of seconds of radio banter, Curve’s shoegazing origins were lost to me, and I thought of them first and foremost as a terrifyingly awesome techno-altrock band. “Chinese Burn” could’ve kickstarted a revolution with its beats and its fury; by contrast, Doppelganger fell too far into the musical glossolalia of shoegazer to make much of an impact.

But Doppelganger is my most recent re-discovery. What brought me back around? I don’t know, exactly; maybe learning about Curve’s second dissolution last year made it a good time to re-examine the back catalog; maybe seeing the video for “Horror Head” made something clicked; maybe turning up the volume made me realize what “wall of sound” was supposed to mean. Whatever the case, I think I’m slowly starting to figure it all out.

The Adam and Joe show on XFM Radio is apparently no more. Why do I know or care about two guys I’d never heard of three days ago? Because during their last show on October 1, they played this—the first recorded output we’ve heard from Charlotte Hatherley’s next album. Please forgive the radio banter, it’s not easy to cut spoken stuff over the music unless you resort to a rather severe fade out. You’ll live.

The next album is currently untitled, but all the sound bits appear to be done—it’s recorded, mixed, mastered, whatever. Despite all this, you won’t likely hear any of it until December, when the first single hits the streets, and then the full album in February or March. As an aside, is it a normal thing to put out two singles before you release the album? That seems strange to me. Don’t expect a Stateside release for this album either, as the last album didn’t make any killer Go! Team-esque breakouts here. Hatherley will instead hit the road in Britain and rest-of-Europe for a good while, probably hit a couple of festivals, then make a break for Asia and Australia. In other words, if you want to see her live in the near future, best book that European vacation for the middle of next year.