It’s okay to admit that we’re all getting a little fatigued by an endless wave of newer shoegaze bands at this point on the timeline. Every day, there’s a potential half dozen press releases to find their way into my inbox alongside another half dozen album announcements on your favorite music site of choice touting the same tried and true influences of My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, and Slowdive. And every time you press play, it’s more or less a familiar formula of a dense, dreamy walls of layered guitars with ethereal vocals melodically submerged beneath them. All of it sounds just lovely, but at this stage, none of it stands out if it all just insists on staying content with sounding drowned out in an increasingly greyscale feedback loop. It’s important to remind ourselves that “not all shoegaze” is falling into this trapping, however — especially when you venture outside the usual scenes. In going the au natural route with their sophomore effort, Brazilian rockers terraplana show the rest of the world that there’s still plenty of corners to revisit and restructure from within when you begin to rely on organic substances.

The Curitiba four-piece of vocalist and bassist Stephani Heuczuk, vocalist and guitarist Vinícius Felix, vocalist and guitarist Cassiano Vidal, and drummer Wendeu Emerick are more forward-thinking in that approach, being kindred to recent singlemates in Brooklyn’s shower curtain and Los Angeles’ julie in exploring a noisier meeting ground between Heaven and Earth that uses the studio space to produce psychedelically blushed indie rock. Through it, they’re unafraid to make visible a separation of each electrical current and a distinct voice amid relying on more than one (especially on the Winter-featuring highlight, “hear a whisper”) within their hook-and-drum-driven sonic structures, collecting the air’s static rather than dispersing it. And yet, just because they’re professing a more audible tutelage from the likes of Blonde Redhead, early Sonic Youth, and Lush rather than another distillation of MBV pedal worship here, it doesn’t mean their music lacks the ability to levitate you above ground, even if it keeps your senses fully intact when doing so.

Highlights: “charlie”, “hear a whisper”, “S.N.C”

terraplana’s natural will be released March 11th on Balaclava Records.

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