Tuesday, December 5, 2006

What the hell happened to my shoes

I have an irrational love for all things "shoegazer". I'm a huge fan of guitar noise, walls of completely destroyed fuzzed out guitar mixed with drummachines and barely audible vocals. Think My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, etc... I go through cycles, once a year listening and looking for new bands or new to me old bands that do something in that format.

So on this years incarnation, I've discovered something absolutely amazing: Loop

All of their albums are out of print, and the only one I've found is via emusic (linky)

Basically, they started out as a spacerock band ala Spaceman 3, and started to move more towards this album, which is a stunning blend of punctuated and droning guitars, and drivingly monotonous rhythms and arrangements that can only be described as the evil hybrid of Godflesh and MBV. Of course, irony of irony, they have been namedropped as a potential influence on MBV, and the guitarist Robert Hampson went on after this album to record with Godflesh on the album Pure.

Needless to say - I'll be hunting out the other recordings, and I'll be digging deep into some serious listening on this album for the next few weeks.

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