This year marks the 35th anniversary of Chapterhouse's debut album, Whirlpool, for which auspicious occasion they have reformed and are touring around playing the whole thing for their eminently discerning fans. Sadly I won't be attending any of these shows because I only found out about it yesterday, which made me so mad I spent forty minutes pacing angrily around my room stimming and babbling to myself until I got dizzy and crawled under my weighted blanket for a sob. Fortunately I can still celebrate the occasion with a blȭǥ post, which also gets me out of having to think of a thing to post about.
Shoegaze was brilliant, so naturally the music press hated it and murdered it in favour of utter shit like grunge and brit pop. Ostensibly, the reason they despised it was because it was "too middle class", which is a stupid reason to cut short the best genre of its era. Powdered wig aristocrats have classical, football hooligans have oi!, so why shouldn't the poor saps who pay taxes have a genre for themselves? If jamming Chapterhouse is "middle class", then mow my lawn and run my 2.5 kids off to school, because Chapterhouse is great and Tony Blaircore sucks.
But since so many shoegaze pioneers were too polite and easily embarrassed to resist getting bullied out of soaking longer in their daydream genre (Lush and Ride went brit pop, Slowdive and The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa took a turn for sparse electronic and Catherine Wheel went space rock, prog, hard rock then prog again), it was only sensible and prudent for their fellow purveyors of swirly headcandy to have an escape plan of their own, which was already somewhat telegraphed on Whirlpool: with their followup Blood Music, they went largely dance-rock.
To this very day I can't decide which album I like more. On the side of Whirlpool we have an obvious ringer in the form of "Pearl", which might be the entire scene's most pristine pop gem. "Satin Safe" is as ominously droney as "Breather" is sunny and light, while "Come Heaven" provides the gritty/swirly template for gothgazers Love Spirals Downwards. Blood Music boasts fewer standouts but is more consistent and coherent as a whole. Blood Music loses points for more intelligible vocals but matches Whirlpool's array of pedals with a sonic sprawl all of its own. Whirlpool is the captivating rush of spring and summer, Blood Music the flourescent melancholy of autumn, but, like Yin and Yang, each contains a drop of the other.
Demos released on their recent Chronology comp suggest a third album might have further integrated the two styles, but we'll never know because after Blood Music they stopped altogether, quitting while they were creatively, if not commercially, lightyears ahead of the curve (no offence to Curve). It's like if I'd dropped The Real Slim Stayvun and The Stayvun by Edgar Allen Poe and then retired into obscurity, content to let the GOATs speak for themselves.
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