Album review: Loop – Heaven’s End & Fade Out

I have memories of Loop that are – appropriately and literally – rather fuzzy. If you’re about my age or a little older, you probably grew up on the golden era of C90 tape trading (which They vigorously warned us was going to kill music). Especially if you were into non-chart stuff; it was hard to get music by obscure bands any other way, simply because HMV or Our Price didn’t stock anything that they didn’t know would sell. And so I had a tape with a bunch of Jesus & Mary Chain singles on one side, and a copy of Fade Out by Loop on the other.

Once you got to the third or fourth generation of copies, C90 albums took on a warm saturated tone that no other media can match, and more often than not when I finally acquired an original of many of my favourite teenage albums they turned out to be much more crisp and thin than they sounded the first time. I never got a copy of Fade Out until this brace of re-releases from Reactor Records arrived in my postbox… and it seems Loop are the only band who sound equally as fuzzed-up and saturated as they did on that long-snapped cassette.

Heaven’s End was Loop‘s first album, and it’s astonishing how current it sounds. This has a lot to do with the cultural wheel having turned full circle, with the spotlight once again starting to fall on the sixties psyche revival sound that culminated in the shoegaze/dreampop scene of the early nineties. Heaven’s End doesn’t sound like what history would have us believe 1987 sounded like. No New Romo rubbish here, but deafeningly loud soundscapes built from guitars shoved through an array of stompboxes, droning riffs and chord sequences distorting their way across simple grooves played on real drumkits, punctuated by wah-wah-soaked pentatonic noodlings and slightly sinister mumbled lyrics drowning in reverb.

Even if Loop aren’t a band you’ve ever heard of before, you probably know a lot of bands that sound like them. In Heaven’s End you can hear where The Jesus & Mary Chain might have discovered the joyous howl of amps and PAs being punished with volume, and where a bleak and moody dissonance first emerged to begin the process of eroding the cliffside of shiny pop. Hypnotic and bluesy, rich and dark, Heaven’s End is a visceral experience even now. Back then it must have sounded like the end of a cultural era… or the beginning of a new one.

Fade Out arrived two years later with a more eclectic scope to the same essential formula, and you can pick it apart song by song to see genres-in-waiting emerging from the noise, as well as Loop‘s own reappropriations from their influences. Hints of The Cure and snippets of New Order get lobbed into the mix, jumbled together with jagged buzzy guitar tones drenched in fuzz and fuck-knows-what, prompting Spacemen 3 to claim them as clones and copyists. But listen also for the proto-baggy grooves, the hints of ecstatic funk waiting in the wings… the nineties were about to arrive.

“This Is When You End” mirrors the dark snarling spirituals of The Jesus & Mary Chain, complete with simple pentatonic riffs that are heavy on the bends and, of course, those hypnotic chord sequences and blattering drums. But later on, the steady and metronomic drug-blues stomp of “Fever Knife” wakes Dave “Monster Magnet” Wyndorf from a stoned reverie over in New Jersey… the whole damned track disappears into a flanger at one point. Not just the guitars, EVERYTHING… and then does it again at the end. Later still, “Pulse” is the sound of Mudhoney storming a treacle-drenched and reverberating Buddhist temple in slow motion. On Ketamine.

Why should you buy the Loop reissues, then? Well, the best reason would be because you’re longing to hear the cavalcade of alternate session versions of the tracks that come on the second disc of each album, and because you love big loud droning guitar tunes that draw a curved line right back to sixties psyche rock and the MC5.

But another good reason would be so you have the missing link between those bands and the new kids flying the flag – bands like A Place To Bury Strangers, for example. The early Loop material completes the circle; for ultimate hipster cred, maybe you could even pretend you’d been into them all along.