Chapterhouse Whirlpool. This was a terribly important record to me. I was a simple boy. Turns out the second album should have been metal but oh how we caterwauled when we, me, dreamt of it. EMF went metal. It didn't do much for them. Breather! Are there 18 guitars on this track? I was a young idealist when I saw Chapterhouse live in Pontiac. While I was there I was also at home recording the show. I didn't collect the entire moment because the tape was not long enough. I missed their cover of Die!Die!Die!. which was so metal-icious. But I did not miss the cover of Rain. Andrew Sherriff is a genius. Do not disagree with me. He's got an emmy, as proof. But as a dictator he was poor doings, Chapterhouse fell victim to what ails so many bands that start out with such promise, one day the drummer comes in and says "I've got a song". Ugh. This, it's mainly led by an assault of acousitc giddy-ups and tender voices, there is a lead vocal but it barely takes precedence over the backing vocals. This was the Cocteau Twins influence, the egalitarian influence, the middle class influence. Shoegazing was much derided for not being working class. Horror. Look at the working man poet Noel Gallagher writing his laments for affluence, next door to his fellow voice of the working class in Beverly Hills the Boss. Oasis killed music in the UK. There was a spark, a hope, this, Chapterhouse, here is where you laff, could have led somewhere more esoteric and avant garde, there could have been a movement towards the artistic and delicate and complex instead of the hammering maw of Liam and woo-hoo. This is one of the greatest songs of the decade. The 90s. It was never a single in the USA. They released Pearl which was ubiquitous on alternaten radio, one summer before Catherine Wheel's Black Metallic and one summer after Ride's Vapour Trail which although being the superior of the three was the least hit worthy. The lazy gaze-y days of summer. Now then we turn to Pearl more delicate still, loads of guitars, already three guitars, the John Bonham sample and more guitars. You could dream of dancing to this at syndrome. The indie sway, the floppy fringe hanging over your face, the striped tee shirt, the chuck taylors and ripped jeans. But you were clean shaven, showered and not nearly so foul as grunge would have made you. Swervedriver complicated things, I was certain I had to enjoy them because they were lumped in with shoegazers but really they were leaden guitar Black Sabbath aping tools of the grunge. I hate Swervedriver. But then Swervedriver have reunited, to the joy of Jack Rabid and their other fan, and still Chapterhouse have not. Andrew Sherriff recorded something electric, I've never heard it. Is it marvelous? Stephen Patman was underrated. Did he make music post-Chapterhouse? There was Cuba, someone from Cuba married Rachel Goswell, shoegazing royalty, but Cuba was part of the dark period for 4AD along with the Paladins and Scheer, oh dear. I am emailing A Dream to someone for their half-brthday, I am profligate, yes yes I know, I should be stimulating the economy with things other than poetry. I purchased the Chapterhouse Whirlpool reissue when it came out some time back. It must be one of the last few CD's I've ever purchased. I could feel alright if it had been one of the last CD's I ever purchase. I feel somewhat disappointed that in fact the actual last CD I purchased is the Pas/Cal album. I made a ritual sacrifice of it recently, tossing it in the trash to cleanse myself of it and all of its disappointment and despair. It really is a dreadful artifact. I am crying across the qwerty just thinking about it. Literate tears of loss. Now to Autosleeper, a Steve song. Maybe my least favorite song on the album. It prefigures Spiritualized's Angel Sigh by a short period. They shared a label with Spiritualized and when Chapterouse started they were lumped in more with sonic terrorists of the sort like Spacemen 3 and Loop than with Ride and their fey gang of accounting students. Chapterhouse resembled a boy band. They turned softer in hopes of being commercial I suppose, but Everett True wasn't buying it, he was more concerned over Courtney Love's mating habits. Was he in Seattle at this point, hunting down those rare Green River 7 inchers and buying his first flannel duvet. This song is boring and meandering and then for short bursts it is intense and dizzying but it is still mainly dull. it is a respite from the tender delicacies they offered us on side one. The next track is the most underappreciated track on the album. Another Steve song but this time done smashingly. Rachel Goswell sung on Pearl but she didn't need to. Treasure now. More guitars, guitars layered on top of each other but guitars without notes, guitars with scrapes and strums and floating bits of effluvia and an emotion more than the truth. Soft voices in a vague repository sunken within the mix, tucked cozily inside to protect from the sunlight that the notes instinctively shied away from. Was it night time music? It was and it was music for late night cemetery picnics and moonscapes splashed across rain swelled brooks and beautiful girls that made your heart quake with fear standing inches away in the near rain hoping for a caress. I was pitiable. There wasn't anything political about this. But there wasn't anything political about the music that replaced it. Blur went on to trumpet cool Brittania but aside from some sharp duds all that it ushered in was an age of luddite hammering about on guitars and dull consciences all singing as one. Tony Blair killed shoegazing. Here is the dreamy sequence, the artless wordless vocals, the wombedelic sensations envelop a sensitive soul not yet inured to the dreams of the world. Not yet innoculated to heart break by the Field Mice or Brighter, when heartbreak seems so poetic and essential that you almost long for it but instead a dream world of Christina Rossetti inspired images of grace and beauty and a world where boys and girls lived in each other's ethereal experience of sunrise throughout the length of a mix tape. Such times. Next, the baggy tune. The wah-wah guitar that everyone stole from John Squire but of course Chapterhouse have about ten guitars here, still without a riff in sight. Was ever there a shoegazing riff? Noel Gallagher wrote riffs, do you remember a single one? No, you don't. I really do despise Oasis. Everyone should have wanted to murder the unibrow and the they nationalistic celebration of mediocrity they engendered. But they love instead of hate, fools. The brow wan't enlightened or clever or with it, he wrote stupid words for stupid people. Oh well. He's still a millionaire, I am still here complaining about the fact. This one sounded great when driving by in the car, past houses of former high school classmates trying to remind them that I was romantic and aware and they were not. This entry seems all about envy. It is the tone of the times. The national mood here in 2009 is to sock it to anyone who might not be suffering quite as much as you though really you brought it all on yourself. Didn't you? Maybe you are the treasurer of your local HOA, a fascist regime, you have a tidy little scrap book with the approved colours for painting the exteriors all suitably dull Mao greys and taupes. You suffer, barely, those that have children but endorse that they drug them with a variety of psychotropics that can be purchased through the monthly newsletter and you are planning on installing 36 inch high speed bumps with spike strips embedded within to keep the Jehovah Witnesses out. And the Jehovah Witnesses they are listening to Chapterhouse! Really. I am listening to April and it is a symphony for twee drone, loads of guitar and a whisper and a vacuous sigh and all of the emotions left vacant by the listless performance. It's color by numbers for a sentimental sap like me, a palette rich with dull torpors, warm nostalgia, tepid earnestness. The climax now, seventen guitars, he's about to express some sort of euphoric glee through involuntary exhalation. Beautiful. Beautiful people would have listened to Chapterhouse. If only Grey's Anatomy had been around in 1991. Andrew Sherriff as the most shaggable man in Britain. And the archetypal indie OFM. I am disillusioned by music mainly. I could join the board of an HOA, become Secretary, demand that people install wireless speakers that look like rocks and demand that Chapterhouse be played 24 hours a day. Rock music. I could threaten them with a lien on their home if they refused. Cheers. I passed a workmate on my bike ride on Saturday. Riding a bicycle is making my arms longer. Why is this? I notice today that I am able to sit further away from the keyboard and type comfortably. Maybe I am undergoing some sort of Lamarckian transformation and soon I'll be able to reach around corners and change radio stations all over the world to the soft drone of Guilt. I remember the Prodigy shoegazing boards, a gentle enclave of Chapterhouse lovers united in cause to free the world of the tyranny of Eddie Vedder and Kurt Cobain. There I was watching some show on the most important songs or greatest songs or whatever songs of the 1990s and Pearl Jam always shows up around the top ten but then there is Nirvana in the top spot, without fail. How is this? Nirvana didn't mean much to the kids I knew. I was in college during Nirvana day and when the kids would spontaneously break into songs in Histology class it was either Black by Pearl Jam or Make'em Laugh. It wasn't ever anyone busting out with 'my libido, a mosquito'. I remember there was once a Spin magazine article with a poetry professor comparing the lyrics of Michael Stipe and Eddie Vedder and Eddie came out on top. By a wide margin he dominated the King of REM. At the time I must have thought that this was preposterous. Had Out of Time come out yet to disillusion me from REM? I can't remember. But Pearl Jam changed a lot more lives than Nirvana ever did. Eddie Vedder may not have actually meant it but he was a convincing actor if he didn't. Sure it was all a load of contrived sharpies and cargo shorts but Pearl Jam deserve your respect much more than Nirvana ever did. I've been typing over the second best song on the album If You Don't Want me, forgive me. This is the second version. I posted the original a while ago, I think it was on this blog. It is, however, most magnificent in this its updated form. The album is worth buying for this alone. Now the last song. So so sad, ethereal doings and etchings from Robin Guthrie and the boyband/shoegazers. It could have fit well on Spooky. I remember the tears of angst and betrayal that were shed over Robin Guthrie's alleged desecration of Lush's genius on Spooky. You know those songs weren't so great were they and then Lush turned rather dismal really soon afterwards did they not? They did. I am writing out my audition for Tangents. The post-Tangents version of Tangents. Now the tender guitar lines spiraling around the center and the vocals drift in the outer orbit of the maelstrom of teen melancholy. The most important record of my youth? Maybe the second most important. Really.