Beautiful Noise

After months of anticipation, BN is finally available for download! As a long-time fan of the early dream pop, and having read all the great comments on Facebook, I had pretty high expectations for this film. Unfortunately, the film is bit of a let-down from my perspective. I had hoped for an in-depth look into the music and history. (I.e. cultural landscape, influences, studio techniques etc.), but instead, the film is comprised mostly of light interviews and a bit of old footage.

Considering this thing was 10 years in the making, the filmmaker seems to have done very little research, or made any attempt to build a connection with the artists. I appreciate the ambitions here to cover a big spectrum of the music, but spending 2-5 minutes on each band definitely left me wanting more. He would have been better off focusing on one or two artists, like last year's "Made of Stone", which I enjoyed very much. The other issue I have with this film is the shallow interviewing. It seems that everyone who appears in the film was asked the same questions: When did you first hear about the band, and why do you like them? I would have learnt more if the artists were asked about their favourite food and colour :)

This film is worth a viewing for anyone new to the genre, but any hard-core fan like myself will already be well familiar with the band chronology, and the music's dreamy, ethereal quality :/

I was ridiculously excited for this documentary, which features some of my all-time favorite bands. I bought the blu-ray (as I didn't know how else to see it) and turned it on feeling giddy as a fervert young chappy. And very soon it became disappointingly clear that this was not the documentary I'd been waiting for.

If you are familiar with these bands you will learn nothing new and most of the interviews are cheek-slappingly banal. And even if they weren't, the cinematography is distractingly subpar: bad lighting, often out of focus, low definition. Why in the heavens is there a blu-ray edition if nothing was shot on HD!? Crappy SD footage will not look better on a blu-ray, but it sure costs more to the excited fans/suckers!

I essentially felt that I would have derived a richer experience surfing YouTube watching old interviews and live performances of the bands, as I'm sure I could find higher quality and more interesting clips that weren't either far too brief or featured for way too long.

And for a documentary about the shoegaze movement, the word "shoegaze" is never uttered, just "this period" and "these bands." I essentially felt more informed than the filmmakers.

I feel that the shoegaze movement was one of the most fascinating periods of music history and deeply deserves a fresh, beautiful, illuminating documentary. Sadly, this is not it.

I was actually skeptical about this film when I saw the trailer and crowdfunding campaign. I had the usual worry of what they would cover in the film and what they would leave out. Some of the talking heads in the trailer were not really of this scene (a bunch of Americans!), so I was ready to yawn and roll eyes. But luckily they were people inspired by UK noise, that although more well-known than the shoegazers themselves, were there as supporting cast rather than the leads. Its quite surreal having massive pop-stars like Robert Smith talking about this much smaller music from a listener's point of view.

So its a vague scene for starters. I mean, where do we say "noise" started? Well, I think its OK to draw the line somewhere and just say it was Britain in 1980. Of course we know about the Velvet Underground and earlier - but this really is about "shoegaze" music (in the late 80s - early 90s), which openly revived the kinds of texture The Velvets and others explored in industrial music, but sometimes with new technology.

So the lead players are really The Cocteau Twins, Jesus And Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. Three hugely influential pillars of popular rock music that didn't really sell a lot of music. What this film does best is just let the musicians, engineers and studio heads speak for themselves. And what you get is not every piece of the sprawling puzzle (snobs wake-up, its impossible to explain everything about a decade of fuzzy music in one film) but a great overview of how the musicians felt about what they were doing and who influenced them. This is supported by bigger known American artists who sight these groups as influential to them.

The film doesn't have the structure and production value of something like a slick authorised Rolling Stones documentary - but thank goodness it doesn't. This was obviously a labor of love and the filmmakers obviously cared about the subject or all the significant artists wouldn't have contributed to it. A Rolling Stones (or any other big group) documentary is an authorised product these days, which means they get to cut out anything embarrassing and basically create a piece of advertising/propaganda to keep the legacy (business) going. Watch a John Lennon documentary and Yoko as the head of the Lennon estate will make sure you never know about John's previous wife.

This is definitely worth seeking out and surprisingly good.

Not a bad effort. However, it would have greatly benefited from featuring a lot more of the bands who were influenced by the original wave. It suffered slightly from only really talking about the main players in this "scene" - Not that it ever really was one, outside of the music press.

Would have been nice in the last half hour, rather than it kind of petering out, to feature the new wave. People who have been influenced by it. More than just a name on a screen and a couple of photos.

Having said this, it's lovely to see some interviews with Guthrie, Kevin Shields, etc and to get their take on the goings on back then.

Not really sure about the addition of Billy Corgan and Trent Reznor though. Never really considered their music either influenced by, or relevant to, these bands.

Maybe they needed them. Just in case the American Market didn't understand the point of the doc... Seemed pointless to me. The sort of people who will watch this doc are the sort of people who don't need Billy Corgan spoon feeding them what they already know. It just came across as mildly patronising to be honest.

In fact, you could argue that the American Bands of the time kind of ruined it all in the eyes of the music press. Smashing Pumpkins, kind of being one of the bands that caused the press backlash in the first place.

Kind of ironic. That.

Oh. And lovely to see that old git Alan McGee churning out his "Loveless is overrated" tirade yet again.

No mate. You are just bitter that they didn't want a drug addict ruining their buzz in the studio. And it cost you a few quid.

Still. Less than you ever spent on drugs. And nowhere near the amount you pretended it cost to perpetrate your sad, mad, self-mythologising. So there's that.

God if I have to hear that wizened old man saying that again, I'll kill myself.

He didn't support these bands. He let them flounder, and as Kevin Shields rightly said, "He was just a drug addict who didn't understand what we were trying to do"

Yup.

Still. I waited a long time for this to surface. I paid me money and was happy to see some of the more obscure bands mentioned (Flying Saucer Attack, Pale Saints) amongst the others.

So all in all, if you like these bands. This won't tell you anything you don't already know. It'll preach to the converted. But I give it a 7 because this doc shone a light on an otherwise overlooked scene that meant a lot to me when I was a kid.

And you can shout "F**k off McGee, you utter, utter twit" at the telly whenever he comes on.

Also. Bobby Gillespie.

Nah. Never took that wee chancer seriously, either.

Some good live footage I'd not seen before too. So hooray for that.

Beautiful Noise is a well done documentary on a very specific type of music. I call it dream pop, some call it shoe gaze. All the bands documented are excellent, but I would have liked to hear about all the fans who came to their shows! There are no interviews from every day non famous fans. Also the bands do not talk about touring which to me is an important part of being in a band. There was so much going on in the early 90s cultural landscape, but there isn't too much mentioned about that. My favorite band Curve only gets a minute of mention. There was no mention about how different their music was and how bands like Garbage were influenced by Toni Halliday and Dean Garcia's music skills. I liked this film and watched it three times to get an idea of what more I would have liked to see.