Sadness by Cosmicdust

At Outside Noise, we love to see artists with no respect for genre boundaries, which means that this week we had no choice but to fixate upon the new album Sadness from Japan’s Cosmicdust. The band categorizes themselves as shoegaze, but Cosmicdust makes a handful of critical moves to diversify their sound. Much of the guitar tone leans heavily on influence from My Bloody Valentine, but other sounds like the vocal tone and the drum production pull more heavily from 80s radio hits. At times, the band even ditches this rock setup altogether and brings in a drum and bass style rhythm section. As an end result, we get an intensely noisy album with its own sonic fingerprint that nevertheless remains approachable even to those with little experience with experimental music. Seeing successes such as Sadness reminds us of the many paths that mainstream pop music has still yet to explore that could still yield catchy and accessible hits, and I can only hope that the industry will start to take chances on sounds like this.

-Michael