A Gilded Eternity [Extra tracks, Original recording remastered]

Loop | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (June 23, 2009)
• Original Release Date: 2009
• Number of Discs: 2
• Format: Extra tracks, Original recording remastered
• Label: ATILA (REVOLVER)
• ASIN: B001RUB1XC
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #182,755 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Digitally remastered and expanded edition of this 1990 album from the hypnotic British Psych Rock band featuring six bonus tracks including demos and Peel Sessions. The album was originally released on the Beggars Banquet album and garnered extremely positive reviews. 16 tracks. Reactor.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars burns beautiful holes in your mind, April 19, 2006

By 

Michael Salmons (out in the garden shed) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gilded Eternity (Audio CD)

For those of you who have never heard Loop: imagine a massive drill boring into the earth, ever spinning, digging a deeper and deeper hole, ever approaching the core, digging with more intensity until you think it's going to crack the earth wide open. Or perhaps you are a yogi, entranced, the mandala of your mind spinning in a pool of pure sound that is impossible to escape. If Loop were an ice cream, it would be a raspberry sorbet that could melt nails. They pile on so much density, so much pure sound in each track, it seems it would destroy it. The sound is molten and sweet and bitter and razor sharp all once, with just enough cosmic glue to hold it together.

These guys may not have invented drone-rock (look to late sixties obscurities Silver Apples for that honor) but they perfected the form, successfully marrying the hypnotic repetition of drone with pure sonic crunch of the Stooges (Spacemen 3 worked that angle too, but Loop swamps them in my opinion). Early efforts like Heaven's End trafficked in the same sort of noisy pop as contemporaries My Bloody Valentine, but with that repetitive, droning, time-warping structure. Subsequent LP Fade Out is Loop at a new apex, a perfectly cut diamond, prefiguring and outgrunging grunge.

Their swan song A Gilded Eternity betters Fade Out with more sophisticated melody, albeit in the same repetitious vein. "Vapour" opens the album in standard Loop fashion, a buzzing anthem dropping Stooges and Sonics references. "Afterglow" sounds vaguely eastern, a whirling dervish with a stomp box. By what used to be the last song on side one (and still is, at my house), "Blood," the album turns in a tantalizing direction: for lack of a better term, drone/ambient. Robert's vocals are not always easy to decipher, frequently mixed down or laden with fx, but here they are positively vaporous, ethereal, floating on currents of delay and phasing. The guitars still burn but in a more abstract place, enveloped in reverb, locked in a slowly decaying echo, immutable. All this makes for a hypnotic, atmospheric album, hard in some places and soft in others, in many ways an emphatic exclamation point ending an era in which "indie" really was short for independent.

Completists: very definitely track down the out of print "Wolf Flow," a compilation of Loop's Peel sessions. The essence of the group's oeuvre is impossibly packed into an hour of glorious stripped-down noise. On it you'll find the distracting glaze removed from the insistant machinery of "From Centre to Wave," revealing the inner workings like the gears in a watch. Relentless and absorbing.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great unknown album, August 21, 2004

By 

Blueearth (Redlands CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gilded Eternity (Audio CD)

An excellent album. A mish-mosh of Sonic Youth, Can,
My Bloody Valentine, psychdelia with a dash of Black Sabbath. Just about every track on this album is excellent, and I think its too bad these guys disbanded. Main was decent, but all of Loops albums have a good driving beat with the mix of guitar textures that Main lacks. This one is where they seem to have gotten the mix just right. Its heavy, yet it floats at the same time(?) After almost 14 years, I still have not grown tired of this album. A good album for driving in the desert late at night.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars No Light Escapes To Heaven From Here, March 18, 2010

By 

kabalabonga - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Gilded Eternity (Audio CD)

My 1990 cassette copy of "A Gilded Eternity" has long since been atomized and levitated away in a fine shower of particulate. It felt like I wore that copy out within a year of its purchase. It was the perfect music for entering headspace through all sorts of avenues, and attentive listening consistently revealed new depths to Loop's final release. This CD is a bonus release, but I'd rather concentrate on the original material, which was trailblazing enough.

Loop's sound shares some surface similarities with Spacemen 3, in that it was heavily-amplified, guitar-driven, effects-laden, and highly repetitive in form. But Loop's sound had a more visceral quality to it; it was massive, monolithic, propulsive, and in its standout tracks carried not only a psychedelic edge, but one that truly embraced and explored the more sinister aspect of that sound.

Nowhere was that more present than on "Blood", the fourth track. A sinuous, heavily processed guitar tuned to a minor key weaves its way through repetitive, tribal percussion and bass-line. The surreal, hallucinogenic quality of the track is amplified even further by Robert Hampson's phased, echo-laden vocals, described at the time by critic Michael Yockel as having been "...phoned in from Jupiter."

Most heavily layered of all of their tracks, "Be Here Now" represents the apotheosis of Loop's sound, and "A Gilded Eternity" the natural conclusion of the direction they chose to take as a band. This is the most conventionally structured song on this release, and yet it still manages to sound as if it's emerging from the deepest recesses of a universe where everything is opiated and the number of fixed, recognizable dimensional points are truly infintesimal at best.

"Shot With A Diamond", which closed the original release, signaled the direction that Hampson would take with Main, an ambient, drumless piece, minimalist in composition, yet rising to a climax of chilling pulsation that has the listener envisioning the slow rupture of larvae from a tarantula wasp through the hapless body of its host.

After splitting from Loop, John Wills and Neil McKay (the band's rhythm section) formed the Hair and Skin Trading Company, which took the creeping sense of menace on "A Gilded Eternity" into a slightly more structured direction on their final release "Over Valence". However, this CD can be regarded as the inspiration from which those compositions sprang, if not the final blueprint. "A Gilded Eternity" was truly one of the genre-bending releases of the '90's, and definitely recommended.