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Jun 26, 2023 Web Exclusive By Dom Gourlay

It’s well documented that 1991 was a pivotal year for guitar music, having unleashed Loveless, Nevermind, Bandwagonesque, and Just For a Day among its many groundbreaking and life-affirming releases. There was another album released that year which didn’t receive as much attention but has grown in stature with age ever since. That record was Whirlpool and the band were Chapterhouse.

Hailing from the Berkshire town of Reading, which also gave birth to fellow sonic experimentalists Slowdive, the Chapterhouse story actually begins four years earlier with the band’s formative period spent knocking out covers of Stooges classics and artifacts from Pebbles’ garage rock compilations. Indeed, their earliest recording, “Ecstasy I” (included here on Disc 5: Rarities and Remixes), has a scuzzy, garage punk feel to it and stood out like a sore thumb on the seven-inch single on which it was released (alongside The Sandkings’ “Need To Know” and Spacemen 3’s cover of Mudhoney’s “When Tomorrow Hits”) that came with issue #11 of Sniffin’ Rock magazine in the early part of 1990.

By the time Chapterhouse came to release their first EP, Freefall, some six months later they were a different sounding band altogether, which pretty much sums up their entire career. Never ones to stand still or stagnate, the quintet’s ongoing quest for musical progression and reinvention is omnipresent throughout Chronology, which collects the band’s entire recorded output across six CDs, including several previously unreleased songs and recordings.

The collection is housed in a colorful, psychedelically designed box and featuring a 66-page booklet written by esteemed music journalist and Sonic Cathedral label founder Nathaniel Cramp. Chronology is an essential addition to anyone’s collection that has a remote interest in Chapterhouse or the genre they came to be associated with, by fault or design. While the term “shoegaze” may have been used in derogatory fashion at the time, it’s difficult to comprehend why Chapterhouse (and their contemporaries at the time) were given such a rough ride when this compilation clearly marks them as one of the most innovative, forward thinking musical ensembles of the ‘90s.

While Whirlpool and the three EPs that preceded it (Freefall, Sunburst, and Pearl) are often regarded as touchstones for the birth of shoegaze as a phenomenon, the band’s later material up to their eventual disbandment in 1996 was years ahead of its time and should see a resurgence of interest and critical reappraisal courtesy of this boxset.

For example, Blood Music in particular sounds like a precursor to Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR rather than the sequel to Screamadelica it got labelled as at the time. While the last set of demos the band recorded for Dedicated that got rejected—mainly because the musical landscape had changed somewhat due to the advent of Britpop—hints at what might have been for a band clearly at their creative peak even if no one was listening. (www.cherryred.co.uk)

Author rating: 9/10