5 Covers Of '90s Shoegaze Songs As Dreamy As The Originals

In need of a nap? Shoegaze is here, especially shoegaze at its unequivocal 1990s heights, when bands like My Bloody Valentine (MBV), Slowdive, Lush, Chapterhouse, etc., defined the genre. No matter how brief that shoegaze peak, full of songs we'd trade the world to hear again for the first time, its songs meander onwards in the form of covers, many of which are just as dreamy as their originals.

But how exactly will we choose the dreamiest of the dreamy, when practically each and every shoegaze song sounds like floating on a flotilla of fuzz and clouds? First off all, no matter how many bands have covered certain stand-out shoegaze tracks, like MBV's "Only Shallow," there are far less shoegaze covers in existence than, say, covers of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love," right? We've got a small pool to choose from, so we've got to stick with songs we can actually find and analyze. Plus, we're favoring songs that aren't just simple copy-paste jobs, but retain some unique flair while also capturing the musical qualities that made the original so dreamy. Finally, we're going to stick with the best covers, even if it means repeating the same original artist.

On that note, My Bloody Valentine comes up again and again in realms of all things shoegaze, especially their 1991, genre-defining masterwork, "Loveless." We've got three covers of songs from this album (one of which is on a whole album cover), plus two songs from a band that's forged a mighty second career for itself, Slowdive.

Slowdive has undergone a massive resurrection in recent years after getting back together in 2014, ascending the throne of the biggest, still-active OG '90s shoegaze band (with 4.2 million monthly Spotify listeners). Fans never forgot them, though, nor their 1993 masterpiece, "Souvlaki," which repeatedly lands near the top of all-time best shoegaze album lists. Hence, the High Violets' 2021 cover of Souvlaki's "Altogether," a swooshing, swishing, dream-like cover that retains the spirit and sound of the original, is pretty close in composition, but isn't a straight-up duplicate.

Both Slowdive's original and the High Violet's cover are roughly the same tempo, written in the same key, have the same lyrics, and so forth. But the Portland, Oregon dream pop outfit's version is a bit sparser on all the frequencies that saturate Slowdive's music and give it its engulfing, oceanic sound. The High Violet's bass is up, the voice is down, and while it's not remotely "rock," there's more of a crunch to the guitars and punch to the drums. But no worries, because it's still as head-in-the-clouds as you can get.

The High Violet's version of "Altogether" is clearly done with respect and admiration, and sits well at the end of their "B​-​Sides & Rarities" album. How B-side and rare are we talking, here? At the time of writing, the song's got a bit under 5,200 listens on Spotify and over 400 watches on YouTube. In other words, Slowdive fans need not fear that a precious track is being marauded for commercial purposes. Authenticity prevails, as it always has in shoegaze.

How big of My Bloody Valentine (MBV) fans are Japancakes (not from Japan, but the state of Georgia)? They did a 2007 cover of MBV's entire 1991 landmark album, "Loveless." A true album to soundtrack your dreams, much like the '90s best shoegaze songs on a whole, we mentioned that "Loveless" gets routinely ranked as the finest, unparalleled exemplar of the subgenre. But because highlighting an entire album is a bit much for this article, we're going to draw the reader's attention to "Only Shallow," the album's first song.

Japancakes' take on "Only Shallow" does everything that MBV's original does, but ratchets up the swimmy floatiness thanks to one key difference: there's no vocals. Vocal melodies across Japancakes' cover album are done with steel guitar and strings. This means that — and we don't mean this badly — it's easier to let Japancakes' rendition fade into the background. "Only Shallow" becomes a pure pool of emotion when pulled away from its lyrics, and it becomes even easier to grok MBV's composition. Fans of the original will doubtlessly hear singer Bilinda Butcher's voice in their heads, anyway. Japancakes' version also loses some of the production fuzz of MBV's original, but the track's core songwriting lets the cover carry the same vibe.

There's obvious love and care put into Japancakes' reworking of "Only Shallow" (and the rest of "Loveless"). As the band writes on Recordflowx, where you can purchase the physical vinyl, "Loveless" is "the defining record of the genre [shoegaze] and completely unparalleled by any artist since." The band also says that they've obtained mechanical licenses, meaning that MBV gets a cut of their sales. Now that's love, and it shows.

There isn't just one band that loves 1991's "Loveless." My Bloody Valentine's (MBV) inspired the lion's share of modern-day '90s shoegaze covers, including a 2021 cover of "When You Sleep" by Beetleflux (featuring Dara Delila). Unlike some of our other entries, this version has gotten a fair share of attention on music services like Spotify, at over 164,000 plays. That might be because MBV's original is their most listened-to song on Spotify by a country mile, at a whopping 130 million, a song that furthers the case for 1991 being the decade's best year for shoegaze. 

Beetleflux's version of "When You Sleep" is less of a cover and more of a reimagining. Beetleflux repackages and re-instrumentalizes the song, retaining its original dreaminess but adding an extended, original intro, removing MBV's signature, warbling guitar notes (probably done with the tremolo bar), and replacing their fuzziness with straight-up guitar grit. Beetleflux also layers chromatic notes onto the song's main riff and generally crafts a more driving, alt-rock version of the song that still skews dreamy. The vocals are woven into the mix like any other layer of sound, which works really well in bringing "When You Sleep's" overall, hypnotic flow and repetition to the forefront. 

On top of all this, Beetleflux's version even features an album cover that mimics MBV's famous "Loveless" cover, down to the font and color palette. Beetleflux aren't the only ones to cover "When You Sleep," but they really went above and beyond while keeping the spirit of the original.

Guess what? We've got another cover of a song from My Bloody Valentine's (MBV) "Loveless" from 1991. Much like Beetleflux's cover of "When You Sleep," Tearjerker's 2019 cover of the gorgeous and haunting "Sometimes" reimagines the song and re-instrumentalizes it. They keep the Billy Corgan-sounding vocals, the album cover, and overall dreamy vibe, but transform it into a song played by a full band and not just one person with a thousand pedals.

But that's why MBV's original "Sometimes" stands out. It sounds like a solo acoustic guitar swallowed by a fuzzy soundscape. There's no percussion whatsoever, and really nothing that deviates from the acoustic strumming and slab of static. Tearjerker opted for a completely different route, adding full drums with a 2-4 snare and a bass with a 1-2 pulse, varying the melodic lines underneath the vocal melody, and so forth. The result is a poppier, even bouncy version of the song that sounds more like skipping through a meadow than drowning in the sorrow of unrequited love (as the song's lyrics describe). In other words, Tearjerker manages to make "Sometimes" fresh again. How they managed to do that with a song that they clearly know so well is impressive in and of itself.

Then again, Tearjerker seems well-equipped for the task. Their entire discography could be described as neo-shoegaze, or non-pop Empire of the Sun, minus the weirdness and growing very sleepy. Clearly, they've done their MBV homework, perhaps earlier in life, and the result is a "Sometimes" that more than sometimes can help you drift off to whatever la-la land you imagine.

We're going to circle back to Slowdive's 1993 masterwork, "Souvlaki," to a cover of the album's opening song, "Alison" (no relation to the vastly-covered 1977 Elvis Costello song). Peering into the depths of last-gen, blurry, one-take, solo-acoustic-performer-in-a-room YouTube covers, we find Casper Iskov's sensitive, heartfelt 2014 take on the song. Possibly because of the drone-like shimmers of Iskov's extremely tight strumming, and definitely because of his extremely sad-looking face, the cover comes across just as melancholy as it does dreamy. It's the best possible interpretation of Slowdive's original through an obviously personal lens. 

"Alison" is an interesting choice to convert into a sad bedroom song because Slowdive's original is actually pretty up-tempo. The song's not exactly cheery, but wistful and naively hopeful in a bright-eyed youth kind of way. As the chorus says, "'Alison,' I said, 'We're sinking' / There's nothing here, but that's okay / Outside your room, your sister's spinning / But she laughs, tells me she's just fine." We've got no clue if the song is autobiographical, but it still sounds confessional. Iskov's version sounds like both, as if there really was a person named Alison (or a stand-in with a different name) who inspired the song.

The views on Iskov's YouTube video (it doesn't exist on music streaming platforms) attest to the impact of the cover, as it's got over 300,000 views on a 15,000-subscription channel. He's also got a similarly successful acoustic cover of Slowdive's "When the Sun Hits" from 2015. That's not too bad for a person who "creates music for public transportation, that makes the journey likeable," as he writes on Spotify.