Catherine Wheel: Chrome (180g) [FONTANA]

Why you'll love it

This reissue comes on 180g vinyl. Chrome took the band's shoegaze sound somewhere heavier, and "Crank" reached No. 5 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart.

This edition

• 180g vinyl

About the album

Some bands make the same album twice. Catherine Wheel very deliberately didn't. Coming off the dreamy swirl of Ferment and a long stretch of touring, the band had grown into a harder, louder unit, and for Chrome they brought in Gil Norton and set up at Britannia Row Studios in London, where Joy Division had made Closer.

Rob Dickinson's voice floats over huge walls of guitar, and Norton keeps everything punchy and clear. "Kill Rhythm" and "I Confess" hit hard, "Crank" is all churning hooks, "The Nude" drifts in on a haze of feedback, and "Show Me Mary" is pure, soaring alternative rock. "Ursa Major Space Station" is named after a guitar effects pedal and "Fripp" after King Crimson's Robert Fripp, which gives you a fair idea of what was on the band's mind. "Half Life" and "Broken Head" add more of that heavy, hypnotic churn.

Storm Thorgerson shot the cover in an indoor swimming pool, and it later fronted his own retrospective book, Eye of the Storm. Shoegaze, it turns out, is something you can also do lengths to.

Also at Kops: more Catherine Wheel on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Fontana (cat# UMCLP044), a reissue of the 1993 album.