Shoegaze geeks rejoice, we have another great album in our favorite genre to celebrate. New York's own The Depreciation Guild just released their second studio album Spirit Youth and it's exactly what dream pop fans have been waiting for since My Bloody Valentine hung up their guitars. At once noisy and beautiful throughout, Spirit Youth is a textbook example of everything that makes shoegaze enjoyable. Together with The Daysleepers' 2008 album Drowned in a Sea of Sound, it seems that the scene that celebrates itself is making a long-overdue comeback.

The Depreciation Guild is a Brooklyn-based band that consists of brothers Christophe and Anton Hochheim, as well as Kurt Feldman who also mans the drums for another excellent indie band, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart. The Depreciation Guild mixes the usual hallmarks of shoegaze (alternately fuzzy and echoing guitars, soft vocals, spare but dynamic drums) with a healthy dose of quaint synthesizer accompaniment. All Nintendo jokes aside, the 8-bit extras on Spirit Youth are earnest and delightful, especially on the opening track "My Chariot".

One of the biggest problems shoegaze always had and continues to have in its niche indie incarnation is its dearth of competent vocals. This is ultimately what ruined otherwise talented bands from the first wave of shoegaze in the early 90's like Ride and Chameleon. That's what sets The Depreciation Guild over both a number of their contemporaries and many of their influences. Christophe Hochheim and Kurt Feldman, who both man a microphone on Spirit Youth, possess the tone-correct pipes on which the genre really depends. No amount of guitar reverberation can compensate for lazy singing. Christophe's lead vocals are like a thread that sews the whole album together, pleasant but no more prominent than any other element of the arrangements.

Track 4, "Dream About Me", is one of the high points on Spirit Youth. It sounds like a natural evolution of the sounds pioneered in the 80's and early 90's rather than an outright throwback. It's capped by a strong guitar solo and peppered with gentle synth. It's a nice lead-in to what is just shy of a straight instrumental track, "November". There are traces of vocals buried underneath the calculated instrumentation on "November" but otherwise it's a nice mid-album reprieve from singing that would otherwise wear a little thin.

Spirit Youth maintains a fairly even keel from start to finish. It's never as exciting as its opening song, but it also never really runs out of steam. The second half of the album is a bit thicker and louder overall, especially "Through the Snow", the last energetic push in Spirit Youth's third act.

If you never much cared for shoegaze, Spirit Youth will do nothing to convince you otherwise. It's an album for fans of that idiosyncratic style, but it's done so excellently that those who have been living off their worn Cocteau Twins records for a quarter century will be thrilled to have something new and proper to enjoy in 2010. It's been a great year for music so far and The Depreciation Guild has made it that much better.