What if Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon were to front a shoegazer band? Whether this happens or not, listening to 28 Days Taurus one can imagine what the result would sound like. The music of 28 Days Taurus is neither a shower of luscious guitar swirls burying the vocals and the rest of the musical accompaniments in its murky cloud, nor is it anarchic noise-pop with the guitars screeching and clamoring as if trying to come out of a bad hangover; it rests snugly somewhere in between.

How Do You Like Your Love? is dreamy and downbeat. Everything in the music is part of the ambience and nothing stands out in front, giving a beautiful aural sense to the music. But for this band, which is so characteristically shoegazer, the music is pretty minimal. Instead of layers of shimmering distortion, the guitar can be discerned, note for note. Its sound is almost muted, creating the sort of a romantic phantasmagoric effect heard in shoegazer music.

Singer Karina Dacosta has a distinctly Kim Gordon-like style with her laidback and sometimes quixotic and impassive singing (“Low Light,” “Freeze, Die, Come Back To Life”), but she still sounds genuine and fresh. She can also sound angelic and solacing (“Endless Sea,” “Waves Of Love”) like Miki Berenyi of Lush.

The band’s brand of music is mired in eccentricity, which makes How Do You Like Your Love? even more interesting. The beauty of the tunes always get mangled in some strange psychedelic twist, which make the songs unpredictable and give them a whole new meaning. “Mo’s Place,” the best example of the band’s weird dispositions, starts off with a Jim Morrison-like hallucinatory recital of a tale by Dacosta and explodes into a profusion of heavenly guitars as Karina goes back to her ethereal singing repeating the chorus till the end of the song.

28 Degrees Taurus not only does a brilliant job bringing the ethereal music of the late ‘80s back to life, but also making it sound hip. The band’s minimalistic interpretation gives a whole new meaning to this music, which relies on opulent layers of guitars. Even the sometimes playful singing adds a touch of mischief to the austere vocal style associated with this genre. If Kim Gordon ever wants to front a shoegazer band, she now knows where to start from.

Rating: A-

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