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.