Progressive 80’s pop / sophisti-pop

Hi Crane!!

The Painted Word (my mistake, its The Painted Word not World) was the band of Peter John Vettese (keyboardist of Jethro Tull), they oonly release two amazingd albums, i recommend you "Lovelife"

Sophisti- pop prog hybrid i recommend you:

North Atlantic Oscilation, I specially recommend you the album "Fog Electric"

Wild Nothing - "Nocturne" where the band shows influences from Shoegaze and Dream pop

Leaves - "The Angela Test" very Radiohead + Orchestrations + pop

Eksi Ekso - "I am your b*****d wings" post rock + orchestraton + pop melodies

I was trying to make a silly joke, that's why there were two silly emoticons there, but I agree with what you say there (the sentences I bolded there). 

Aren't Nordic Giants a post rock band? I listened to one of their albums. If i remember right, I suggested them here on PA. 
 

Honestly, it is possible that over time they have come to mean different things, but certainly when they were first used, they were used interchangeably. Dreampop was coined as the name of the genre before shoegaze. In fact, from memory shoegaze as a label came about in a similar way to Krautrock - as a joke, that was never meant to become a label, but somehow stuck. I think the joke was something along the lines of “Dreampop? You may as well call it shoegazing.” And so people did, and what was once known as dreampop started to sometimes be called shoegaze as well.

But because shoegaze was coined in the UK, it took awhile for the usage to make it across to the US. (It would be different for sure these days, with the interweb as it is now.) That meant for a time, generally speaking, bands were increasingly known as shoegaze in the UK, but still known as dreampop in the US. Bands like My Bloody Valentine who are definitely more rock than pop to me, were initially known as a dreampop band. I suspect any separation of the terms has been done retrospectively.

Personally, I don’t really care, and have never used either label. Neither gives a great indication of what you are going to hear. They are as arbitrary and meaningless as grunge was. But living in NZ, where we had about 50/50 media coming from the UK and the US it was definitely noticeable at the time that the same band was called dreampop initially by both, and then shoegaze in UK media, and dreampop in US media.