Shoegaze is pretty amazing, if you really think about it. How could music be so soothing and so jarring all at once? At first blush, My Bloody Valentine sounds like the kind of thing you’d fall asleep to, but have you ever seen them live? You come out of there dazed and confused, blood trickling out of your ears. I think it’s magic. Alchemy, at the very least. Dresden’s own JAGUWAR are most decidedly a shoegaze band. They sound like MBV and Jesus and Mary Chain – there’s no avoiding the comparison – but they do it really well. This EP is a smoker, end to end, from the heads-down no-bullshit cosmic groove of awesomely-titled opener Breathe Bullets Which Taste Like Pure Fruit to the earphone-melting bliss-apocalypse of final salvo Lower. Concrete-cracking waves of noise rides the rails with lysergic, space-surfing riffery in a swell of sex and violence so intimately intertwined you can’t tell the orgasm from the sucking chest wound. It’s gorgeous and grotesque all at once.

Available from Pretty In Noise Records