Loop
Sonancy
Cooking Vinyl
Mar 25, 2022 Web Exclusive
The brainchild of Robert Hampson, Loop formed in 1986 and released their gnarly and noisy debut, Heaven’s End, the next year. They gained momentum and 1989’s Fade Out and 1990’s A Gilded Eternity both topped the UK indie charts, and space-rock, as people were calling it, was all the rage.
Their impact in the U.S. wasn’t as overwhelming, but they were embraced by college radio and sat comfortably alongside other quasi-psychedelic, space-rock units, most notable being Spacemen 3. With a list of members numbering near a dozen, and their ambient trance rock, they carved out a niche in the wild frontier of the early ’90s, but remained a mysterious, foggy entity on a distant shore, often reflected sonically in their music.
Loop split in 1991 and Hampson formed Main, while the other members became Hair & Skin Trading Co. Hampson reformed Loop in 2013, and in 2015 released the enjoyable, albeit stunted, Array EP, hinting at what might be on the horizon. The latest installment, Hampson with Dan Boyd on guitar, Hugo Morgan on bass and Wayne Maskel on drums, picks up where the EP left off with Sonancy, Loop’s first new full-length album in 32 years.
The tightly packed single, “Halo,” makes its presence felt immediately with buzzy guitar and an upfront stuttery drum part, the vocals interposing like a cosmic ghost. Similar to Bailter Space, there is an amorphous melody often trapped in the gauzy miasma and listening for it draws you into their throbbing, hypnotic ache, pulsing through all the noise. There is a sonic poetry and timelessness to this music that is hard to quantify. As if it comes from a distant galaxy and doesn’t answer to our concepts of time or space. (www.soundheads.org/loop)
Author rating: 8/10
Average reader rating: 5/10
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