Lauren Lakis

Lauren Lakis is a singer-songwriter and a guitarist who plays in a dreamy shoegaze style that combines her floating, ethereal vocals with a relatively aggressive and fairly distorted fuzzy guitar attack. She started out playing these components in a smoother indie rock type context in her earlier recordings but then moved towards the kind of swirly melodic vocals and ringing guitars that may be reminiscent of classic Cocteau Twins catalog. As she continued to turn up the dials, her sound grew darker, and her vocals, hazier. There are times when she brings goth style post-punk shades into her songs as well (see the deliciously gloomy "Fear of God"). Apart from her strong melodic base, her music also stands out with her instrumental passages, especially on the guitar.