By: Rich Buley
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Released on June 22, 2015 via ATP Recordings
The last time seminal UK psych rockers Loop released any new music, Paul Gascoigne was crying into his England shirt, the USSR and Yugoslavia were finding state unification increasingly tricky, and the first web server was created, which would lead to the launch a year later of a new thing called ‘The Internet’. What a waste of time that was.
Yes, A Gilded Eternity, Loop’s third and last album, saw the light of day all the way back in January 1990, more than twenty five years ago. It was regarded by many, myself included, as their most accomplished, accessible work, with spiralling, enormous and repetitive riffs clashing fiercely with a largely uptempo, cavernous rhythm section. Along with bands like Godflesh, Spacemen 3 and The Telescopes, Loop provided an excellently dark, hard-edged and slightly foreboding indie alternative to the seemingly all-conquering noise pop of the time.
The band disappointingly split just a year later, with singer/guitarist and chief songwriter Robert Hampson moving on to release far more ambient, minimal material as Main, and under his own name, while other band members were involved in projects such as The Hair & Skin Trading Company. Cut off in what I consider to be the band’s prime, it would have been fascinating to see how the band that delivered one of my favourite albums of all time would have developed their mesmeric, enveloping drones.
Well, perhaps inspired by the twenty first century reformations of band contemporaries like My Bloody Valentine and Swervedriver, and citing ‘unfinished business’ (I should say) in a revealing press statement, Hampson reformed A Gilded Eternity’s line up in 2013, and I began salivating at the prospect of seeing one of my favourite bands live again – dribble to be unconfined as I witnessed a ferociously loud, deeply arcane performance in Bristol later that year.
Alas, it appeared not to be, again. Whatever ‘unfinished business’ there may have been was either finished very quickly, or transpired to be unfinishable, with the band splitting again last year. However, this time Hampson announced within what seemed like days that Loop had reformed once more with a brand new line up, and had been recording new material.
Array 1, the new EP, is said to be one of a series of three planned releases this year, and with a name like that, an announcement to that effect was probably unnecessary. ‘Precession’ begins the four tracker, and what is absolutely remarkable, for a band that is only one quarter 1990 Loop, is the fact that it sounds, save for a slightly unfamiliar, heavily processed Hampson vocal, exactly like Loop, circa 1990. The crushing, droning, insistent riffing, the claustrophobic, head-spinning rhythm, the feeling of being sucked inexorably into an all-encompassing, swirling cacophony – it’s all there, brilliantly.
It’s a nostalgic and fantastic return, and yet the remainder of the EP demonstrates that this incarnation of Loop may well be a many-headed beast, with Hampson’s taste for sound experimentation to the fore. ‘Aphelion’ reigns in the riff slightly, puts the vocal higher in the mix, and adds tom tom and hissing electronics. ‘Coma’ showcases Hampson’s inherent understanding of the layering of electronic whirs, drones and lingering keys to create texture, mood and ambient symphony, while the seventeen minute ‘Radial’ is, eventually, an old school, fuzz-filled Psychedelic hoedown, book-ended by two five minute sections of further, percussion-less, fretful drones.
Where Array 2 and Array 3 (well, that’s my guess at the titles anyway) might end up sonically is anyone’s guess, based on the breadth of work on show with the initial four track outing, but it is a very special thing indeed to have a thoroughly convincing manifestation of Loop recording and releasing music again after all these years. With Robert Hampson at the controls, future output is very likely to be some of the most blasted, awe-inspiring and visionary rock music you will hear in the course of the next twenty five years.
