Tag: Shoegaze

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Tunes

Best tunes of 1992: #1 Ride “Leave them all behind”

<< #2

Number one equals “Leave them all behind”. Hands down. This is my favourite song of 1992. And it is also my favourite Ride song. How can you argue with eight plus minutes of pure joy and ecstasy?

Ride’s sophomore album, “Going blank again”, was my introduction to the Oxford quartet of Mark Gardner, Andy Bell, Loz Colbert, and Steve Queralt. I first heard it probably a year, or maybe, a year and half after it was released. My friend Tim gave me a cassette dubbed copy on one of our common trips back to our hometown of Bowmanville from our respective universities.

I was living off campus while attending York University that year, just north of the city of Toronto, in a basement apartment in Vaughan. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend, barely enough for rent and groceries, so much of my time outside of class was spent just hanging around the apartment. I didn’t have a computer (the internet wasn’t really a thing yet anyway) and only the most basic of cable packages, but I did have my music. I spent a lot of time making and remaking mixed tapes, using music from other cassettes or my still rather small CD collection. A good many of those mixes contained songs from “Going blank again” and I’d wager that “Leave them all behind” was on more than a couple of these.

It is the opening track and the first single off “Going blank again” and where the rest of the songs on the album signal an easing away from the shoegaze fold for Ride, this one is pretty much textbook. As I mentioned at the outset, “Leave them all behind” is a shade more than eight minutes. The alien orb opening – reverb and sirens and flashing lights – gives way to an explosion of drums, roaring guitars and Steve Queralt’s muscular bass. Mark Gardner and Andy Bell sing as one, not harmonized, not foiled, but like two laser beams from two different sources focused on the same target. The words they form don’t really matter as much as the melody produced. It adds another crashing against the ordered chaos, the cacophony, like a sonic onion, from which many layers peeled away reveal yet more layers.

Indeed, “Leave them all behind” is not a song to which you listen, but one that is to be felt, touched, and experienced. You close your eyelids and you can see it there in the darkness. And when it devolves into senseless noise at the end, it just makes perfect sense.

It is the only song that could have been number one on this list. So let’s play it again.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1992 list, click here.

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Vinyl

Vinyl love: Venus Furs “Venus Furs”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: Venus Furs
Album Title: Venus Furs
Year released: 2020
Details: standard black vinyl, hand written note from the artist

The skinny: A week and a half ago, when I started my annual series counting down my favourite albums of the year, I told the story of how I learned about a new act out of Montreal while perusing one of my favourite sources of all things indie music, Under the Radar. The self-titled debut by this very same act, Venus Furs, captured my imagination and drew me in while listening to it on Spotify through my iPod ear phones. It may have been during my second time through that I went on the hunt for it on vinyl, thinking that something this expansive required owning it in a better format. I ordered a copy of it from frontman Paul Kasner’s own label, Silk Screaming records, and received it within a couple of days, complete with a handwritten ‘thank you’ note from the man himself. Always a nice touch. “Venus Furs” ended up squeezing its way into the number 9 spot in my top ten for the year and if you enjoy noisy psych rock in the vein of Spiritualized or My Bloody Valentine, this might just be for you too.

Standout track: “Chaos and confusion”

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 1992: #4 Catherine Wheel “Black metallic”

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It’s kind of funny now seeing the term bandied about and used (and perhaps misused) to describe a lot of today’s bands and indeed, a lot bands describing themselves using the word and carrying the banner for ‘shoegaze’. Especially since, back in the day when it was coined, it was used with such derision and the bands affiliated with the sound did their best to distance themselves from it.

Catherine Wheel was one of these bands that hated the term. And yet their debut album, “Ferment”, was a textbook case in the sound – the effects pedals, the hazy and droning guitars, the uncertain vocals buried deep in the mix – and the advance single, the seven plus minute, “Black metallic”, has been called by many to be the “Like a hurricane” or “Stairway to Heaven” of the genre.

Catherine Wheel was formed in 1990 by guitarist Brian Futter, bassist Dave Hawes, drummer Neil Sims, and frontman Rob Dickinson*. They released a couple of shoegaze-informed EPs before signing to Fontana Records and re-recorded a bunch of tracks from those EPs to form the basis of “Ferment”. However, if you listen to the other four of their albums after the debut, you can hear Catherine Wheel slowly but surely beating the shoegaze out of their music. With each successive album, the alternative rock got a bit harder and more pedestrian and my own interest in them ebbed and flowed as they toyed with their sound. They did quite well in North America, though, a success outside of their native England that not many of the original shoegazers were able to achieve.

And it all started with this one, “Black metallic”, after its music video got picked up and was thrown into heavy rotation on MTV. The video was filmed using the 7” version and at just over four minutes, much shorter than the 12” version and the one that appears on “Ferment”. I prefer the longer version and I can’t imagine I’m alone with this opinion. It can almost be called a ballad and is definitely a love song. Or a falling-out-of-love song. The swoon-inducing line that is repeated throughout, comparing his lover’s skin to that of a car, could actually be Dickinson’s way of painting the love as gone cold.

“I’ve never seen you when you’re smiling
It really gets under my skin“

The reverb drenched guitar intro is quickly joined by a lazy beat and the chiming, swirling guitars. It all blends together like a dry ice fog, even in the quieter moments, where Dickinson’s vocals should be clear as day, they are still somehow obscured, the white noise, a figure in the room, a fifth player, a silent observer. These, of course, have their counterpoint and in the messy guitar rave outs and they are given plenty of room to breathe. The length of the song expands and exhales and yet still somehow doesn’t feel self-indulgent in the least. It’s beautiful and sleek, like the line of a fine muscle car and just as dangerous, when all revved up. Why don’t you take it out for a drive right now?

*Who some might be interested to know was the cousin of a certain Bruce Dickinson

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1992 list, click here.