WFA: Mo Dotti

Another full and exacting year for music is coming to a close, and even though there is a team of us at Everything Is Noise, we cannot cover all of the things that thrill us over the course of a year. Some things we discover late, others we just couldn’t fit in, and we do have our Missed Connections series to help with that. However, at least for me, doing Weekly Featured Artist columns can help pick up some of that slack. Much like my last WFA, I am stoked to bring you another artist that have contributed to many hours of my 2024 listening habits, Los Angeles’s Mo Dotti with their September release, opaque.

Mo Dotti plays the perfect blend of shoegaze, dream-pop, and alternative rock on opaque, already praised in Bandcamp’s Albums Of The Year list. This album offers an execution that many other shoegaze revivalist acts miss, that is balancing the moody, reverb washes with fun rock riffs, ethereal vocals with pop hooks, catching that sweet spot of ’90’s slacker rock with unique textures in a way that isn’t purely nostalgia, but elevates the craft for the re-emerging genre. Just listen to the way “whirling sad” hits all of these points while giving us sad kids something to dance to.

Gina Negrini, guitarist and vocalist, says of the band’s beginnings:

‘I always played in other bands [and] for a long time and I wanted my own outlet for songwriting. I love to sing so I wanted to write my own songs that I could sing myself. Shortly after I started Mo, Guy [Valdez, guitar] started writing songs with me and we played them live with a drum machine. We would loop bass lines and guitar lines. It was pretty difficult to do so we got our friends to play bass [Gregory Shilton] and drums [Andrew Mackelvie]. After years of clunky and experimental beginnings, here we are with our first LP in 2024.’

The band carries a pop-classicism with them, showcased on the chorus of tracks like “for anyone and you” or The Smiths-esque melodicism on “really wish”. There are obvious comparisons to be made in the alt/shoegaze world for Mo Dotti‘s influences, but some unexpected ones as well, Negrini says:

‘Of course MBV [My Bloody Valentine], Ride, and Swervedriver, but I am also obsessed with Stephin Merritt‘s (of Magnetic Fields, the 6ths, Future Bible Heroes) songwriting- everything he does, great pop music with heart wrenching chord progressions/melodies. I am also obsessed with  Madonna. And I don’t know if it directly influenced the sound of the band, overall, but sometimes I try to channel her vocals.’

Now that she mentions it, I can get some of the Queen Of Pop’s influence on “wasted delay”, though the way the guitars in the song sound like a muted pastel green haze that rushes through the wind as you’re shot out of a cannon is a far cry from “Material Girl”. And while these songs have a poppy character to them, they aren’t beholden to the standard relationship and romance themes of pop music. ‘Often, I am inspired by a mood or feeling that I haven’t necessarily experienced but am somehow nostalgic for.’ Gina says. ‘I go on a lot of long walks. It helps me get inspired. Lyrically. the songs get perceived as being romantic at times, but they are usually not… I don’t mind that they do, though. It’s open to interpretation.‘

For me, the shoegaze revival came as a bit of a surprise. About two years ago, I was approached to help develop a cocktail for a goth night at a local venue. The friends who put that night together have continued to put on events centered around goth music, but also, in no small part, shoegaze. It has been a thrill to see some incredible up-and-comers in the scene, and those few bands are only the tip of a much larger iceberg of modern shoegaze. It can be easy to drown in the distortion of so many new bands, but this is nevertheless, an incredible time to be a fan of this music. Mo Dotti has made a strong case for being one of the top artists I have heard in this new wave of shoegaze. ‘It’s cool that younger people are into loud guitar music that is abstract. We are just happy to be included in the conversation, albeit in a small way,’ Gina adds.