Smashing Orange

Siblings Rob and Sara Montejo established Smashing Orange as the United States counterpart to the shoegaze scene then unfolding across the U.K. in the first half of the 1990s, folding in additional strands of 1960s garage rock. Early singles and EPs issued on British soil earned widespread praise, yet the same recordings drew markedly less attention within the United States. The band’s first full-length album, The Glass Bead Game, appeared on the American Native label in 1992; its successor, No Return in the End, followed on the MCA roster in 1994. Not long afterward the group slipped from view and ultimately dissolved. In 2005 the Elephant Stone imprint assembled a retrospective of those formative recordings under the fitting title 1991.