Chapterhouse - Pearl

Pearl is considered a shoegazing standard, but to my ears it falls right on the borderline between shoegaze and Madchester-era Britpop.  With just a touch less drone it could be a Stone Roses song.  But fuzzy guitars and breathy, monotonous vocals plant one foot firmly in shoegazing land without detracting from the big Brit-pop hooks.

The result: one of the most radio-friendly shoegaze songs of all time.  A gateway drug to the world of fuzz.

Pearl notably samples not just one, but two, famous drum tracks.  The basic beat is a sped-up sample of John Bonham's masterpiece in Led Zeppelin's When The Levee Breaks, arguably the "heaviest" drum riff of all time (once compared by rock critic Chuck Klosterman to mammoths falling from the sky).

The other drum track is not really a sample, though many people think Chapterhouse stole the skritchy riff at 3:00 from Siouxsie and the Banshees' Kiss them for Me, which came out a few weeks earlier in 1991.  But a little digging finds the same beat in the 1983 rap song P.S.K. What Does It Mean? by Schoolly D.  Did Siouxsie and Chapterhouse both sample Schoolly?

Actually, no.  It turns out that drum beat was one of the prefab settings in the popular Roland synthesizer.  And it also turns out that producer Stephen Hague was working with both Siouxsie and Chapterhouse in 1991, and he must have liked the sound of it.

For those of us who were listening to alt rock radio or MTV back in 1991, that beat takes us back to a golden age.

The video below, of a shorter radio version, displays both the best and worst excesses of the shoegaze era. With its almost pornographically lingering close-ups of singer Andrew Sherriff, it strikes some viewers as charming, open, guileless, and timeless, while others just want to punch him in the face.

The Verve - Star Sail

The first song on the first album by The Verve, aptly titled A Storm in Heaven.

Groundbreaking.

From the very first chord—from the very first note of that slowly strummed chord—you know you're in the presence of something new, some unprecedented fusion of shoegazing shimmer and hard-rock muscle.   The monstrous distorted reverb in that gentle chord declares an intent.  It takes a stand.  It makes a promise that any rational person would be skeptical of seeing fulfilled.

And yet, as the song unfolds, the promise gets fulfilled again and again, in ascending stages: first, with the ethereal background vocals at 0:33, then with the jangly, roaring power chords at 0:57 that announce the real start of the song.  And against all odds it turns out to be worthy of its own prelude.

Richard's Ashcroft's vocals—it could have been a disaster with a different singer, or a different engineer—somehow blend in seamlessly, like another instrument, while still conveying meaning, albeit rather nebulous.  But nebulous is just right for this kind of music.

Surely the coup de grace comes when Nick McCabe—who has already paralyzed and anesthetized us with his haunting, echoing guitar—launches into the goosebump-inducing Interstellar Space Drone at 1:34.  McCabe gets my vote for best guitarist of the 90s.

From there, the tsunami just keeps building, stacking wave upon wave, drone upon drone, chord upon reverberated chord...until suddenly, without warning, it's fading gently out...into the first shoegazing song I ever heard, the one that got me hooked....

Cocteau Twins - Carolyn's Fingers

Imagine hearing this when it came out in 1988—or even more radical, imagine hearing it in 1982, when the Cocteau Twins first started releasing music like this.

For context, some of the the most popular songs on the radio in 1982 were:

• Olivia Newton-John - Physical
• John Cougar - Jack And Diane
• Chicago - Hard To Say I'm Sorry
• Daryl Hall and John Oates - I Can't Go For That
• Journey - Don't Stop Believin'

Now picture this bizarre sound breaking onto that scene.  There had never been anything like it.

The guitars were as fuzzed-out as a Black Sabbath riff, but chiming and pretty, instead of muscular and satanic.

And Liz Frasier's vocals were more like opera than rock.  And what the fuck was she saying? Nobody knew.

Turns out she wasn't saying anything.  And that's one of my favorite things about Cocteau Twins music.

Unlike 98% of the songs that I like, which only disappoint me when I finally figure out the lyrics, I will never be disappointed by the meaning of a C-Twins song.  Because it's just sound.  She's making up nonsense words, and I love it.  I assign my own meaning to Liz Frasier's portmanteau poetry, and my version will always rule.

Sometimes I like to imagine that I'm an alien who wakes up in a different body, on a different planet, every day.  It helps gain a fresh perspective on things that have become too familiar.

So put on your headphones, turn this up loud, and imagine you're a being of pure consciousness who just woke up in a human body for the first time.  No expectations.  No context.  You're suddenly a human, and this is what it feels like to be human.

Hell yeah!  I'd happily sign on to a planet where this is the soundtrack.  Where this is what life feels like.

Before this song, there was nothing else like this in music.  Afterward, there are countless imitators, but none of them do it this well.

Congratulations Cocteau Twins.  You made art.

Read more about the Cocteau Twins in Heaven or Las Vegas.