Customer Reviews

A Gilded Eternity

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4 star:		(4)
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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.

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.

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.

Loop, is a band that seems to have vanished from the radar screens of the cool kids. Too bad, because this record is pure pleasure. Very trance inducing music like the track , "Be Here Now". These albums deserve a reissue, as do the Main and Hair and Skin Trading company albums. This band and its offshoots way beyond their time. Worth every penny.

Wow...that's really something. This album is one of the great albums of the shoegazer era; it's on par with Spacemen 3's "Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To". Deep debts should be paid to earlier dark space rockers such as Hawkwind, Can, Floyd, and also to artier, minimalist types like Suicide, and the Pop Group (many of these bands' songs were covered in earlier albums). This album, however, takes a lunge forward into more adventurous structures and sounds, cops a bit of that "modern" Godflesh vibe, and intones itself as the precursor of the bands that come forth once the noisefest that is Loop ends (Hair & Skin Trading Co., Main). Afterglow and The Nail Will Burn are standouts and sound extra good driving late at night. The record is out of print, but if you like any of the bands mentioned in this write-up, there's a fine chance your investment in time and cash would be worth it.

Salmon's review says it better than I can. I ran across the cassette back in 1991. It was sent to the newspaper I worked for for a review that never came. It was WAAAAY over their heads..hell, it is over mine. I love music of all kinds, and although I bought Psychocandy (credited with starting the breif movememt) when it first came out, I never knew there was such a thing as "shoegazer" until this last year when I came to amazon to replace that aging cassette.
I have to say this is music on another planet. I is undefinable and utterly unique; hypnotic and unnerving. I now own more Loop, and this definately their best work.
This record will never age; it timeless, Johnny Cash timeless, Hank Williams timeless.
Too bad folk not actually looking for this stuff can't hear it.

I will not be overly verbose in my description of this work, but merely say that it is the finest piece of guitar-heavy psychedelia to emerge from the UK on the late 80's/early 90's cusp that I have had the pleasure of experiencing. Fifteen years or so have passed since I first heard this on J.K.'s Balcony with Q...it still moves me to tears.

One of the best albums of all time.. Buy this record now.. No one in the UK or the US for that matter can touch this release.. It really moves me..

Loop were one of the really potential big things back then. This CD is absolutely fantastic and really is a classic in noisy rock...

Frantically surfing last Friday for some--any--distraction from my farcical and pointless day labours I chanced happily upon a great online interview conducted with Robert Hampson round about the time of the re-release of Loop's three flawless studio albums. The refreshingly low-temperature former hairball is currently crashing quietly in Paris of all places but make no mistake this visionary noise guru from Londing Town is still very much a cat in full possession of his pajamas. I was particularly heartened to hear him say that he believed the last record, A Gilded Eternity, to be the Croydon combo's best work. Amen to that, mon frere. With knobs on. I am in fact digging that blistering bleddy bombardment right now on me headphones--not the reissue mind you but the older disk with just two bonus tracks--and from the opening blast of Vapour to the uptempo stomp and grind of Arc-Lite this record is clockwork rock of the most relentless power and precision. Not a single wrong note in the mix here plus I honestly can't get over how good Track 5, Breathe Into Me, still sounds after all these years--a stunning slice of high-pitch headbust that just will not quit. The very first Loop tune that ever got me ears rotating was the title track on the second album Fade Out and that apocalyptic semi-slo-mo drone tornado will ever have a special place in me ticker but for straight-up haymaking exhilaration Breathe Into Me is hard to beat. Marlon Brando even crops up in the hypnotic curiosity Shot With A Diamond and stone me if old Mistuh Kurtz don't seem dead at all but very much alive and raving in his hut. Track 7, Be Here Now, is an extended sonic nodalong that opens up with something that sounds very much like a helicopter--puts me pants in a trance every time. The interview with Robert ended with a dispiriting comment section where sundry pillocks and planks rehearsed that tedious ancient jive about Spaceman 3 and Loop: who stole what from who, who exactly influenced who, which band is better et cetera and ad farking nauseam and I must say this utterly bogus and manufactured rivalry makes my teeth hurt. I can and do dig Spaceman 3, even listened to nothing else all of last week and was as happy as a pig in the proverbial to do it, but in the end who seriously gives a flying flock of seagulls what Sonic Bimbo is supposed to have said to some stupid hack? Not me. For my dosh Loop and the two astronauts don't even float in the same kettle of onions anyway although frankly I do admit to getting a big bleeding bang out of both these bunches of bagonghi limey blighters. I guess if some surly hitman with an impossibly huge head shoved a .357 Magnum in me mush and said choose your poison I'd have to side with Loop on account of these dudes rock with a harder edge and a deeper groove. Plus the spacemen's lyrics are just so clearly apparent and accessible, a drawback Loop sidestep brilliantly by having Hampson sing the vocal portions from inside his hot press so what you mostly get on the records is the majestic industrial rumpus of guitars, drums and bass. All three Loop albums boggle and boom in their own way but for sheer refinement of a specific sonic style A Gilded Eternity is pure pulsating pleasure poured into the porches of me lugholes.