Speaking of nostalgic shoegaze…

Most of the conversations about the history of shoegaze are focused around three bands in particular: Ride, Slowdive, and My Bloody Valentine. This trinity embodies much of the spirit of shoegaze that modern revivalists try to channel with their own work.

But there are hosts of lesser celebrated bands from the same era who, despite lacking the same footprint, are still entirely worthwhile. Case in point: Chapterhouse.

And what’s especially interesting about early shoegaze bands is that for the most part, there was no roadmap to the genre yet. There was no definitive work summarizing the shoegaze sound—Loveless would be released months after Whirlpool. My Bloody Valentine was certainly active and influential, but up to this point, their output was still a bit punky and noisy, far from the womblike fog of Loveless—save for a couple songs from that album that had been released as singles.

As a result, Whirlpool is entirely free of Loveless’ influence—unlike every shoegaze album released after it (even Ride and Slowdive shifted their trajectory as a result of Loveless’ release). But it’s not an obvious absence. It’s aimed in the same direction, with many of the same elements: woozy, fuzzy walls of detuned guitars, dancehall-ready drum loops, sluggish, syrupy vocals that seem to hang in the fog without making much of an impact on anything around them.

It gives a context that is often missing among shoegaze historians—Loveless is often discussed like an alien monolith dropped onto earth: a massive omen, independent of any context, that is both signifier and gateway to the next step in evolution. But Whirlpool—like other pre-Loveless shoegaze albums—tells a different story; a story of a large collection of bands chasing the same Platonic ideal of shoegaze like a form that existed outside of these musicians’ work. My Bloody Valentine may have been the ones to finally wrest that form from the aether and put it on tape, but it didn’t belong to them. That spirit was flowing through the whole of the British shoegaze scene.

That spirit fell on Chapterhouse, they channeled it into the lovely, dream Whirlpool. The record is thick and decadent, oozing with a druggy blurriness that obscures the record. The songs themselves are often jangly pop tunes not too unlike 60s outfits like The Hollies or early Beatles, but the production and instrumentation are foreign. The vocals are buried under layers of guitars that are themselves coated in fuzz, reverb, and modulation. The drums are straightforward, free of any aspirations of rock and roll deification. In some places, the drum set is entirely replaced with a drum machine or tape loops, like in the almost Britpoppy “Pearl” or the way-pedaled funk groove of “Falling Down” (the intro of which my wife compared to the Newsboys).

For all of the warped haze, there are still a few minutes of rock and roll muscularity. Opener “Breather” is fast paced and commanding. “Guilt” shreds powerfully on an urgent beat and punk-like downstrokes, even featuring a noisy guitar solo freakout. Final track “Something More” almost closes with a proper guitar solo.

But for these brief outbursts, the heart of the album is the glistening, disorienting haze of shoegaze where guitars are more textural than melodic and the human voice is just another color to paint the atmosphere with. Nothing shows this more than the album’s meditative six-minute-plus centerpiece, “Treasure.” It’s a trance-like piece: vocals are stretched and warped with reverse delay and tape manipulation, guitars are almost indecipherable as they hang above a restrained rhythm section playing a hypnotic groove. In other words: pure shoegaze.