Watching Black by The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. A hard to pin down mixture of shoegaze, ambient electropop, and indie rock from the Czech Republic.

Artist: The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa

Album: Watching Black

Genre: Ambient pop

Length: 38 minutes

Release Date: 2006

The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa wasn’t something I expected to be listening to anytime soon. I stumbled across their album, Watching Black, sometime during last week and it was described to me as “Czech band that’s shoegaze-y”. I don’t necessarily disagree with that, as I can definitely hear shoegaze influences in the most (especially My Bloody Valentine), but there’s a few influences that are missing from that brief description.

The song Wrong Time, Wrong Place (#3) features a simplistic indie rock feel with two “dueling” vocalists, a male and a female, who take turns saying or repeating one of the verses as an guitar strums the beat in the background. The song then segways into Gun And The Stars (#4) which takes a turn towards electronic and tribal. Featuring drum beats that circle around each other, female vocals underlayed with a vocoder, and a particular tone that almost sounds like a frog croaking.

I hypothesize that these seemingly tribal influences might come from their Czech background, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m not that familiar with the Czech music scene.

Afterwards comes the more “industrial” song Watching Black White Looking (#5) contains an instrument that sounds like rubber rebounding over a long distance, hazy vocals, and during the later half of the song, a particular shoegaze-y combination of guitars (the guitars come back again in the song Thrash About (#6)).

Honestly, I don’t think my genre description does this justice, but I can’t find words to describe the sound. It’s an interesting combination of a lot of genres and it might be worth a listen for curiosity's sake. There will be a 320 CBR download below.

Professional Review - None

Youtube Video - Single song, Watching Black White Looking

Grooveshark Playlist - None

Album Purchase (Physical) - Your best chance if you really want to purchase the CD is Discogs.

320 MP3 Download