Nostalgia is both powerful and deceptive. Jack Tatum, the solo force behind Virginia-based Wild Nothing’s debut album Gemini seems to be well aware of this. Draped and drizzled in hazy-gazey reverb, Gemini will most likely be the summery soundtrack for newly budding romances of timid star-crossed lovers the world over. In many ways, Gemini is a séance of sorts and Tatum its medium, channeling the ghosts of shoegaze past and paying homage to the moody, melodramatic spirits of ’80s and ’90s legends, Morrissey, Marr, Shields, the brothers Reid, and Smith, whom Tatum, (tongue firmly planted in cheek) quotes on “Pessimist,” singing, “Boys don’t cry, they just want to die,” in the process.
The album is chock full of the jangly guitar, under-stated bass, and unabashed whingeing that cemented its contemporaries into the sleeve-worn hearts of adolescent high-school drop-outs only decades ago. A tried-and-true, teen-tested, critic-approved formula, pop and shoegaze have been mixed, mashed, combined and blended into multitudinous incarnations on numerous records ever since albums like My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and The Jesus & Mary Chain’s Psychocandy wormed their way into the record collections and best-of-lists of thousands. The question then, is how does Gemini measure up to these established classics?
In terms of pure emulation, Gemini is a triumph. Tatum has done his homework. Everything from the lovelorn lyrics of “Live in Dreams,” (“our lips won’t last forever, and that’s exactly why, I’d rather live in dreams, and I’d rather die”) to the washed-out guitar strums of “Summer Holiday,” the subtle tambourine shakes of “Bored Games,” and the quintessential classic “Just Like Honey” beat of “My Angel Lonely,” Tatum is spot on. He pulls every post-eighties punch he can muster, and almost always connects. This is excellent song-writing, suspiciously so, and though Tatum has delivered one of the best debuts of the year, perhaps the accolades belong more to those who came before.
Which brings us back to nostalgia. The problem with nostalgia, and subsequently shoegaze or dream-pop, both genres, which are heavily rooted in their connection to the past, is that it often serves to distract us from the present or the future. Siren-like it calls to us, promising the pleasant, comforting reassurances of fond memories and golden Kodak moments of yore. Looking back is a trap, and as the biblical Lot’s wife supposedly discovered the hard way, crushed into granules of sodium, moving on is essential. Many bands have successfully imitated these influences, (See last year’s Pains of Being Pure at Heart) but with our gazes transfixed by the past, we lose sight of the excitement of the present as well as the potentiality of the future. The challenge then, and what separates the proverbial best from the rest, is taking one of the most-treasured and easily identifiable genres of music, and making it new and exciting all over again.
That’s not to say Gemini is by any stretch of the imagination a poor album. It is, in fact a picture perfect imitation of its original source material. Unfortunately, this likeness, that which makes Gemini so compelling, is paradoxically also its Achilles Heel, that is, ultimately, Wild Nothing’s Gemini seems content merely with the resurrection of its predecessors, while re-treading a tired genre in desperate need of someone audacious enough to re-define it.
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