Few genres have evolved less over the last couple of decades than shoegaze. Since the early ’90s the genre has remained frozen like a paused VHS screen, flickering but never progressing, contently drinking up a moment in time. Like most shoegaze acts, Milwaukee’s Lost Spirit make no pretenses of reinventing the wheel. Their rippling guitars and dreamy melodies are pulled from the same dog-eared playbook the scene has been passing around since the heyday of bands like Ride, Lush and Slowdive. Yet what the group’s self-titled EP lacks in surprise, it makes up for in creature comforts. It always amazes me how, for all their predictability, these sounds can still feel fresh in the right hands, so when a timid little song like “Devotion” swells and bursts into a rumble of shimmery guitars, it feels like an earned moment, even if it was a predestined one. There’s still power in these old tropes, and Lost Spirit understand how to harness it.
You can file the group’s EP under “music we missed.” They released it online last summer, with a cassette release a few months later, but I’ve been binging on it since discovering it just this week. It’s brief, cycling through multiple moods and singers over its fleet six songs, and that brevity makes it easy to keep coming back for seconds.
You can stream it below, via Bandcamp, and catch the band when they perform as part of a daylong fundraiser for Girls Rock Milwaukee at the Borg Ward on Saturday, Jan. 10.
