Drop Nineteens Pull Blankets of Sound Over Bar Le Ritz

Drop Nineteens is a band you’ve only heard of if you can define the word shoegaze or can at least give it your best shot.  Some shoegaze adjacent bands manage to escape that whole zeitgeist, but Drop Nineteens are one you stumble upon if you’re specifically looking into the genre and its roots. There is often disagreement over the boundaries of the term and defining it without a sigh beforehand is rare. I can do it, however, because I live and breathe this stuff. Shoegaze is 90s-flavored alt-rock with a lot of guitar effects. It often, but not always, evokes a sense of melancholia and longing and is usually in some way inspired by the legendary My Bloody Valentine, despite nobody ever really sounding quite like them. Drop Nineteens is a band that checks all these boxes and is a prime example of the distilled shoegaze sound for those in the know.

Up until 2024, the band had yet to tour since before their breakup in 1995. I only get to see this band now because of the immense popularity of shoegazing on the internet that reunited them as fully formed adults. (Knowledge nugget: Back in 1992, Drop Nineteens played a show in Bristol with Radiohead as the opener.) I’m often skeptical of seeing reformed bands as adults, especially ones with music so quintessentially teenage, but their 2023 revival album Hard Light was leagues above what I had anticipated. Still, the music I love by the band is no doubt off of their first record, Delaware, which I discovered on my first shoegaze binge back in high school. The album’s unquestionable centrepiece, Kick the Tragedy, is a drawn-out instrumental that washes you away with soaring noise and gets you so high on its melodrama that by the time the spoken word passage hits in the back quarter of its 10-minute runtime, it’s impossible to still have the heart to call it corny. It shoots you through a tunnel of memories, letting you know that while there’s no going back from here, there is always hope in the future. This is the feeling I turn to shoegaze for. An embrasure of teenage wonder and confusion, and the sentiment that everything is different now, but somehow that’s okay. 

But how do you dance to music best experienced staring longingly out the window? I’ve been to a few concerts like this one in the past and the answer is that you don’t. Some people sway, or bob, or jump a little, but mostly you stand still and let the musical current take hold of your body.

I arrived just as the opener, Olivia O. (who the band kept referring to as Olive) stepped onstage. She was alone up there and at Le Ritz that can lead to a pretty intimate atmosphere, which really suited her moody songwriting. Every song was punctuated with giggles and thank yous to the crowd, who were wildly diverse in age and style, but all shared some unspecific thing that made them obvious shoegaze concertgoers. She’d spend a whole two minutes creating ethereal vocal and flute loops that she’d go on to play her acoustic guitar and sing over. Her songs were equally angsty, vulnerable and fairylike. It was surprisingly captivating for a one-person show but still lacked that intoxicating feeling you get from a whole band playing in front of you. If I’d been more familiar with her songs in advance, maybe it would’ve felt less like somebody else’s friend ripping it at the back of a party. She mentioned being a citizen due to having Canadian parents and claimed that meant we liked her by default. From the back, I shouted, ‘Where from?’ and her reply was a word nobody has ever been happy to hear outside of a geography quiz; Ottawa. People cheered, but there was reluctance in their pitch. 

Drop Nineteens stepped onstage, wearing their 30-year hiatus on their faces. These are not rockstars, they’re people who made some cult-followed music in their 20s and have been living completely ordinary lives since. They more resembled people you’d see taking their kids to the movies or complaining about local politics on cable TV. Vocalist and guitarist Greg Ackell’s awkward delivery in between songs turned that ‘regular guy look’ into something they’re taking on the chin. It was refreshing to see them not trying to be anything but what they are now, because what they are now is a group that was never meant to be famous.

I wasn’t sure what material they’d be playing, since they had just last year come out with a new project. When the first song they played was Delaware’s self-titled opener, I knew we’d be in good hands. The band had six members onstage and shifted between having either four guitars or two basses. Either way, their sound was undeniably huge. That classic fuzzy bliss pulled a curtain over everything else in the dim red lighting of Le Ritz’s stage. The two vocalists’ quiet harmonizing was warm under blankets of shimmering tone. When they played their third track, “Mayfield”, off an unreleased record from the band’s early years, Paula Kelley’s voice finally cut its way through the mix, showing off that her talent far outshined Ackell’s quiet rambling swagger. She sounded 17 years old as she pulled out her star-shaped tambourine and the slight wobble when hitting the high notes only added character. During sections of swelling guitars, every member would stare down at their feet, focusing on the various pedals. I kept thinking to myself ‘They’re really doing it.’ When they played “Winona”, another highlight from their debut, they renamed it Raquel, for a fan in the front row celebrating their 19th birthday. I’m almost sure I heard Raquel scream that it was their favourite song when they began playing. Their setlist did not overstay its welcome and was complete with both a cover of Lana Del Rey’s “White Dress” and a cover of Madonna’s “Angel”, which finished off the show pre-encore. They let us hang onto our cheering for longer than I’m used to until they finally stepped back into the light. After tying his shoe onstage, Ackell let us know that ‘they don’t call it shoegaze for nothing.’

The band returned to play one more favourite from the old catalogue, “My Aquarium”, before announcing that we knew what was coming next. Before “Kick the Tragedy” started, they talked about how that song is bigger than the band themselves. They told us that they dropped an official music video for the 30-year-old song only last week. The video is made up of hundreds of clips of fans dancing, enjoying themselves, seeing the world, or just hanging out, which the band had requested. The comment section underneath is filled with people pointing themselves out and gushing over this video immortalizing an experience they’ve had with a loved one. Ackell expressed gratitude that there were so many people who seemed to love the song so deeply and could not believe the staggering number of clips that had been sent in. There’s something about the homemade nature of the video that perfectly captures that transcendent feeling of the track, their combined emotional impact is something every fan of the band will feel. Before the first kick drum, Ackell announced that tonight, “Kick the Tragedy” was our song. 

When the long haze was over, and the musicians departed from the stage one by one, we were left with nothing but Pete Koeplin’s steady drum beat to reflect on how it had all gone by so fast.