THE FOG IS starting to roll in at four o'clock. Scarves are looking good. My desire to ditch my diet of salads and meager chicken breasts for meats swathed in gravy is increasing exponentially. It must be fall. Perfect timing, then, for all the shoegaze that is about to hit the shelves at Berkeley's Mod Lang Records this month.

No, I'm serious. Dear music lovers, we are poised on the icy precipice of a shoegaze rock revival. Everyone start growing out your bangs and pulling out those old Creation releases. Bands, dust off your flange and distortion pedals. We're gonna rock ... atmospherically.

My first tip-off this was about to happen came when I randomly met up with my friend Heiko at a Swedish press junket for Absolut vodka. (And let me tell you, the richest nation in Europe knows how to throw a motherfucking press junket!) Heiko is the editor of a German electronic music magazine called Groove (www.groove.de) out of Berlin, and in addition to all the banging Deutsche techno and Cologne shuffle house he has to listen to for work, he's a huge fan of late '80s-early '90s alt-rock, and he boasts the unusual distinction of once belonging to every Depeche Mode fan club in the world.

Heiko recently put together Feedback to the Future: A Compilation of 11 Shoegazing Songs from 1990-1992 (Mobilé). The record features out-of-print jams from the well-known (Lush's "De-Luxe," Adorable's "Sunshine Smile") to the comparatively obscure (the Telescopes' "All a Dream," Moose's "Last Night I Fell Again").

These songs inspire nostalgia, but they also sound oddly new, especially when placed next to the current crop of derivative garage rock bands. After all, something that's 10 years old still sounds fresher than something that sounds 40 years old. The songs also remind you just how many current bands count classic shoegaze records like My Bloody Valentine's 1991 opus, Loveless, and Curve's 1992 wall-of-sound monolith, Doppelgänger, among their influences. Acts like Múm and Mogwai might not have developed if not for the genre's sweet feedback and earnest songwriting. Even electronic musicians are in on it, with bands like Austin, Texas' Stars as Eyes delivering all the fuzziness of early Ride and labels such as Morr Music presciently releasing Blue Skied An' Clear, a 2002 compilation of electronic artists, such as Lali Puna, B. Fleischmann, and Solvent, redoing Slowdive songs.

Also this month, Spiritualized – not a "pure" shoegaze band, but certainly one that shares the genre's spacey, dreamy qualities – are back and rocking the spot, and rumors abound of a My Bloody Valentine reunion, following Kevin Shields's soundtrack work for Lost in Translation.

Seeking further validation for my pet theory of the week, I rang up Aaron Axelsen, program director at Live 105, progenitor of the seven-year-old Popscene club night and lover of shoegaze. Axelsen has been playing releases by bands like Lush and Adorable at Popscene ever since they came out, although he says that mixing shoegaze in with more outwardly rocking numbers from Hot Hot Heat and the Strokes is more of an exercise in educating the younger end of the 18-and-older crowd about the music that was cool when they were still in Underoos.

Axelsen was the import buyer at Mod Lang in 1991 when My Bloody Valentine came to town. "My ears are still ringing to this day from their show at Slim's," he says. "It was the loudest show I've ever been to." Although he credits new bands like Sigur Rós and France's M83 with melding "a modern-day aesthetic with that big, giant washy sound," he says he hasn't heard many clubs going back to shoegaze, even with the revived popularity of the indie rock club in the last few years.

I, for one, spent lots of happy nights with the old floppy-haired favorites in the front room at Fake, and when Nako or Rubella would throw down a Ride or Stone Roses track, it would just sound so much warmer and more real then the cold, hard pulse of electro. Sometimes, especially when it's cold outside, you're just in the mood for cuddle rock.

And while I am totally down for the early '90s to come back musically – shoegaze, acid house, and Nirvana's Incesticide totally twizzle my wizzle – the fashion can stay in the past.

Axelsen hopes the hair is over. "I had shoegaze-hair envy," he laments. "When I started Popscene with [Fake's] Omar Perez and [Monday Night Hoot's] Eric Shea, they both had that Tim Burgess moppy haircut, and I was really jealous that I couldn't grow hair like that." I, for one, had been secretly praying that no one started wearing those pleated Z. Cavaricci pants again; in keeping with 10-year revivals, the company recently e-mailed me a press release saying it's back in business, too. You win some; you lose some.

Popscene takes place Thursdays, 10 p.m.-2 a.m., 330 Ritch, S.F. $5-$8. www.popscene-sf.com.

Spiritualized perform Nov. 11-12, 8 p.m., Bimbo's 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, S.F. $20. (415) 474-0365.