The first Pale Saints song I heard. I managed to tape the video off Rage in 1990. I liked that they were peculiar compared to the other upstart shoegazers Ride and Lush. The impeccable arrangement of Time Thief had alluring hints of menace deployed amongst the exhilarating tension and release dynamics and then those choirboy vocals added more spice to the unnerving vibe.
Time Thief - Pale Saints [1990]
This was the video that interspersed clips from the creepy 1961 psychological horror film The Innocents with live footage of the band... er, the sound's a bit dodgy but well worth a look though, as it's an extravaganza of sound and vision synchronicity.
One of the best things about The Pale Saints debut LP was the finale one two punch of Sight Of You and Time Thief. The two songs run into each other and need to be heard together as the drama builds at the end of Sight Of You leading up to the exciting Time Thief intro. In the great tradition of other tunes that are connected with no gap and run into each other (which I wrote about here) like I'm Your Boogie Man/Keep It Comin' Love from KC & The Sunshine Band, Donna Summer's I Need You/Working The Midnight Shift, INXS' Face The Change/Burn For You and Palace Of Brine/Letter From Memphis by The Pixies. I'm sure there's many more examples... Anyway I can't find a clip of Sight Of You and Time Thief together so...
Sight Of You - Pale Saints [1990]
Dreamy pop noise goes ecstatic! Anthem for the teenage shoegazers I was.
Sight Of You - Ride [1990]
Speaking of Ride they did a cover of Sight Of You for a John Peel session. It's passable but I kinda wish they didn't do the fade out because that racket they were whipping up at the end was the most interesting bit...
This frantic pop tune smothered in squalling psychedelic noise is quite the exhilarating racket. A slice of prime shoegazery.
Classic noise pop/shoegaze that you might not know because they weren't on Creation or 4AD and didn't have s high profile publicity machine at their disposal. The Charlottes were top tier though, perhaps not as beloved these days because they had a towering dense heavy sound and weren't as ethereal as the other groups. Their second LP Things Come Apart released in early 1991 is a minor masterpiece as the five tunes on this post attest.
The Charlottes - Prayer Song [1991]
They get into a classic kaleidoscopic pummelling groove here. Loud layers of ceaselessly swirling fuzzed out guitar bliss. Pretty awesome.
The Charlottes - Love In The Emptiness [1990]
Ferocious and dense shoegaze that heads towards the gloomy but the band's bracing energy doesn't let that get you down. Pouting in the face of the abyss on this tranced-out mantra-rock classic.
The insane and great drumming on all these tunes is provided by Simon Scott who would go on to shoegaze fame and fortune as the man behind the kit for Slowdive.
The Charlottes - Liar [1990]
The sensational clamorous pop thrills of Liar was like The Hummingbirds covering Dreams Burn Down. This was their glorious pop moment and chance at shoegaze stardom, that was not to be, a few months later they had broken up and become a footnote in shoegaze history.
The Charlottes - See Me Feel [1990]
They get into a frenzy on this frenetic fuzz and wah-wah monster. A barnstorming noise-pop triumph.
Before they started calling it shoegaze it was just indie pop that was a bit noisy sometimes known as noise-pop. Here we have a fine example from Holland. Crystal Eyes is in an aesthetic sweet spot somewhere between the You Made Me Realise EP and You're Living All Over Me. A blistering lil tune that leaves you in a whirl and wanting more.
There's a ghost of a song hidden within the pure dream-gaze of Silver - Fairy Threaded's psychedelic ambient haze.
Loveliescrushing's 1996 cd Xuvityn sounds like if you took the music of Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, Seefeel etc. then stripped out the melodic song elements and entire rhythm section just leaving shoegaze's sonic detritus: the ethereal ambience, dreamy atmosphere and static textures of the blown out guitar amps.
Blooded And Blossom-Blown [1996]
Hard not to be enraptured by these impeccable waves of ambience and atmosphere. The pure empyreal tones of ascending to heaven.
Apart from Melissa Arpin's vaporous vocals this holy symphony of sound is all exclusively created by Scott Cortez and his guitar.
Wednesday, 12 November 2025
A tribute to the world's greatest dog Cooper James (2013-2025). RIP.
*I'm repurposing a post from 2016 for some reason. Probably because I just started reading that David Cavanagh book about Creation Records only 25 years late or because I've been listening to loveliescrushing's second LP Xuvetyn from 1996 which is excellent but is highly indebted to Loveless and would not exist without it. I mean when i was 19 in 1991 and Loveless came out I bought the tape and played it to fucking death. Then a couple of months later I saw My Bloody Valentine play twice at The Prince Of Wales in St Kilda. I was so obsessed I made sure I got my hands on Belinda's set list for both nights. That took pride of place on the door of my bedroom wardrobe in the sharehouse I lived in for a few years. Somewhere along the way I stupidly lost those lists. I think by about March 1992 I'd listened to my Creation cassette of Loveless so much I couldn't possibly listen to it any more. It wasn't until the early 00s that I heard it again when I found a copy on cd in an op shop which was handy as I no longer had anything to play tapes on. Since then I have the occasional listen skipping the way too overplayed Only Shallow and the previously released Soon and To Here Knows When. I mean those two tracks from Glider and Tremelo respectively had been played to death by the time I got my hands on Loveless. For me there's two classic albums in this era really, Glider and Tremelo combined and Loveless sans the two tracks from the EPs...
The deliciously dazed and frenetic bewilderment of Loveless still astounds to this day.
MY BLOODY VALENTINE - LOVELESS [1991]
Really do I need to spill another word onto a page about the merits of this LP? This recording is one of the most pillaged albums in rock’s history. The Jesus & Mary Chain laid down the blueprint via Phil Spector, The Beach Boys, The Velvet Underground, The Ramones, Dr. Mix & The Remix, Aeroplane Runways and more. Dinosaur Jr., Husker Du and Sonic Youth added the extra flavour and My Bloody Valentine made noise rock at its most beautiful, blurry, melodic, disorientating and come on I have to say it, BLISSED OUT.
Kevin Shields provided his considerably unique guitar talents along with Belinda Butcher. They together did their extraordinary girl/boy vocal thing. The rhythm section was none too shabby either with the aforementioned Deb Googe on her heavy, dubby and sometimes pummelling bass. Colm O'Ciosoig provided the drums as well as occasional sampling/production/engineering duties.
It all began to come together in 1988 with the release of the You Made Me Realise EP and Feed Me With Your Kiss followed by the brilliant LP Isn’t Anything. My Bloody Valentine were on an incredible roll that turned into an avalanche with 1990’s Glider EP & 1991’s Tremolo EP followed by Loveless!
Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation may have taken rock to its furthest reaches but Loveless took it beyond the universe and even into un-rock regions ie. ambient and ultra vague dance-rock. This was future rock’s cherry on top. We thought ongoing sonic exploration of rock was to continue but this was it. Loveless has now become an almost melancholy sonic document, like modernist Russian architecture that’s now in ruins, because it was never bettered. Don’t let that get you down though because this is a hell of a peak for rock’s innovation to go out on.
Here come the cliches. Loveless was hazy sweet languidity with a noisy and chaotic undercurrent played with frenzied yet laconic enthusiasm. Like the band’s name suggested a conundrum was at work here, where apathy and hysteria were used to describe the same song. Deliriously indolent, what about listless exhilaration? One tends to forget this record also fucking rocked as well as swimming in oceans of intoxicating euphoria, sometimes all at once. Oh yeah, Loveless is also pop music at its finest. Ecstatic aural pleasure at its Zenith.
*This review was written for the HC website in maybe 2014(?)
WHEN YOU SLEEP
Words are very unnecessary...
...but...
When You Sleep is blistering noise pop of the most excessively exuberant kind so astonishing its wooziness will leave you woozy.
TOUCHED
Someone once commented 'Why didn't they do a whole side of the eerie and bizarre sort of stuff like Touched and the in between track hazy ambient gear?' That would have been cool.
ONLY SHALLOW
Best opening tune to an LP ever?
i ONLY SAID
HOLY SHIT! This still sound incredible in 2025. Still drowning in pools of euphoria and disorientating elastic psychedelia.
COME IN ALONE
And you go here's another one just like the other one... it's ok... then hang on a fucking minute this might be the greatest My Bloody Valentine tune of all. Waves and waves of guitar elation with equal amounts of gloriously disconcerting undercurrents. Mind melting.
SOMETIMES
Then you go oh fuck I forgot about the unplugged lo-fi anthem Sometimes! How good is this. Can it get any more cozy than this deceptively low key jam as it infinitely progresses getting higher and higher and more and more hypnotic as it expands heavenwards.
WHAT YOU WANT
Hang on, hang on I forgot about What You Want... now surely this is the best tune here. There's something melancholy about this one like you're having one last romantic liaison as your summer affair draws to a close. Breathtakingly dizzy like falling in a dream, so bittersweet and aberrant.
Yes people forget, as the popularity of Loveless has somewhat unexpectedly soared over the last 34 years, that this is pretty fucking weird music. Often off colour and bizarre yet always retaining a potent effervescence if a bit claustrophobic.
Highly unusual, seemingly ramshackle but perhaps highly designed and tightly controlled wah-wah damaged tranced out space rock of the highest order. It's pretty fucking electrifying! This was the most raw and garage-y thing to be included under the banner of UK post-rock.
For underground noisey rock 7" singles from the 90s it doesn't get any better.
A hypnotic funky psych-groove jam with some neat twangy surf guitars, lead guitar lines put through a wah wah for added trippy effect while a space age synth adds further out there flavour.
*This goes right back to the dawn of the CardrossManiac2 blog. This great tune Megattera was included on the fabulous all killer no filler compilation Flipper Psychout: Original Italian Library Music From The Vault Of Flipper which was in the top 5 best archival compilations of 2011 list.
