As the first single from the genre-defining Loveless, My Bloody Valentine‘s “When You Sleep” might be shoegaze’s representative song or close to it. Combining a hooky melody played on a sampler with dense, distorted guitars and so many different vocal takes that you can barely make out the words some of the time, it seems to embody everything about the genre in a brief little nutshell.
But Illinois duo Friko decided to drop the shoegaze from their new cover of “When You Sleep” completely. Instead of the iconic sampler playing the melody, they clean it up by just playing it on an acoustic guitar. Niko Kapetan sings the vocal melody mostly solo with a tiny bit of backing vocal here and there, clearly and cleanly. There’s a synth or something in the background giving just the tiniest bit of the haze you expect in shoegaze but it’s so far in the back of the mix that it doesn’t really take away from how “acoustic” the cover sounds. When the main hook is played a later in the cover, there’s a keyboard doubling the guitar. And there are some stray sound-effects during the refrain that subtly remind us of the cover’s origins.
On the whole, it’s a straightforward cover. But playing it on acoustic guitar and avoiding the shoegaze tropes that so define the original makes the song seem fresh. It was also catchy, of course, but it’s even catchier when the melody isn’t hidden behind a sampler that sounds like it is playing old tape and layers of guitar and vocals. It’s a fun spin on a song that many non-shoegaze fans have likely never heard.
