Shoegaze and the specific era of the early 90s that produced the classic records is something I keep coming back to as a historical moment.

The conditions that made that music possible were specific and probably not reproducible. The UK music press of that era was willing to anoint new scenes and give them concentrated coverage. The recording technology — specifically the transition to digital recording while still using analog effects and guitars — created a specific palette of sounds that couldn't have existed earlier or later. The economic conditions of the UK music scene at that moment provided infrastructure for bands to record and tour.

What came out of those conditions was a body of records that still sounds like nothing else. Not because the techniques haven't been copied — they have been, extensively — but because the records that defined the genre were made in a specific cultural moment that gave them a particular emotional charge.

Revivals can copy the technique but they can't copy the moment. The question is whether that matters, and I don't have a settled answer.