{"id":221065,"date":"2025-10-18T01:08:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T01:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/221065\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T01:08:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T01:08:08","slug":"they-are-gutting-a-body-of-waters-lotto-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/221065\/","title":{"rendered":"They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s ‘LOTTO’ Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThey Are Gutting a Body of Water<\/a> have been one of the most crucial American shoegaze bands over the past decade, from the DIY neo-shoegaze hotbed of Philadelphia. Douglas Dulgarian began making noise as TAGABOW in 2017, playing house shows and releasing early cassettes like 2017\u2019s Sweater Curse. But the TAGABOW project came together as a flesh-and-blood band with bassist Emily Lofing, drummer Ben Opatut, and guitarist PJ Carroll. Their new LOTTO is their most intensely emotional noise yet, a showdown with addiction and disease and death. It\u2019s an exorcism of an album \u2014 heavier than heaven, hotter than hell, bold as love.<\/p>\n

\n\tOnce dismissed as a Nineties fad, shoegaze has never stopped mutating and expanding as a musical language. Pioneers like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Slowdive are infinitely more beloved and influential now than back when they originally existed, as young musicians keep exploring how to use these hyper-distorted guitar sounds to tap into emotional forbidden zones that can\u2019t be accessed any other way. It\u2019s all about opening up inner space \u2014 kind of like the way MBV would crank up \u201cYou Made Me Realise\u201d until everyone\u2019s central nervous system would melt like a Dali-clock souffl\u00e9 somewhere around minute twelve.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDulgarian, the son of a dirt-track racer, epitomizes the restlessly innovative spirit that keeps shoegaze so vital. He started TAGABOW in Philly, a town with a long-running homegrown DIY punk tradition, with early gems like his 2019 Destiny XL. But he began mixing in elements of Nineties drum-and-bass and glitchcore noise breaks on the groundbreaking experiments of Lucky Styles and Swanlike (Loosies 2020-2023). He\u2019s also made his Julia\u2019s War label a shoegaze mothership, putting out pivotal albums by Her New Knife, Ruth in the Bardo, Bad History Month, Glixen, and Mormon Toasterhead, as well as better-known names like Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, and Feeble Little Horse.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tDulgarian anchors LOTTO around the lead-off track \u201cThe Chase,\u201d a terrifying horror story where he agonizes his way through a drug relapse. With no reverb to hide his voice behind, Dulgarian narrates the harrowing details though the digitally drenched chaos. \u201cI dream of teeth falling out,\u201d he mutters. \u201cI dream of swimming through dirt, and later wake up in a pool of sweet, as she gazes at me lovingly, the me she remembers.\u201d He\u2019s physically torn between love and death, marveling at the soul-crushing power of both. But it ends with him forced to ask himself, \u201cTo which one will I say \u2018I love you?\u2019 To which one will I say \u2018I need you or I\u2019m gonna fucking die\u2019? Because it\u2019s true, it\u2019s for both after all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tThe band\u2019s ever-evolving sound takes a step forward on LOTTO. For all the electro mayhem, it\u2019s the off-kilter blast of four musicians causing havoc in a room together. \u201cAmerican Food\u201d is a road-trip swirl of sirens, hip-hop beats, DJ scratches, a skewed folkie vocal chant\u2014\u201ctell me there\u2019s a better one, and I\u2019ll go and get my gun\u201d \u2014 through layers of distortion. Moments of lyrical guitar beauty pop up, as in \u201cTrainers\u201d or \u201cRL Stine,\u201d only to get trampled underneath blasts of industrial-strength feedback roar. In one of the most moving tracks, \u201cHerpin,\u201d a fragile electric strum meets up with an oddly nostalgic roller-rink organ. They head down the road together, hand in hand, getting clobbered by shockwaves of noise, wobbling side to side, yet never quite toppling over. Like everything else on LOTTO, it\u2019s a moment where fierce industrial brutality creates raw human emotion. Even on an album with this much bleakness and terror, They Are Gutting a Body of Water make a beautifully uplifting noise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They Are Gutting a Body of Water have been one of the most crucial American shoegaze bands over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":221066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341,106253],"class_list":{"0":"post-221065","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-they-are-gutting-a-body-of-water"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}