FOR THE RECORD COLUMN: Two essential additions for your collection
By TED McLENDON
Ride "Nowhere" (sire/reprise 1990)
Unlike Ride’s later and more brit-pop oriented music, "Nowhere" is built around subdued, introspective vocals and lush over-amplified guitar experimentation. The hushed and nebulous vocals, which seem to come whispering from deep within the shadows of high-rise amplifiers are blanketed by the heavy cover of textured guitar melody.
The band’s layering of notes in calm succession creates an ethereal, almost hypnotic, groove that carries on through the album. This sound becomes particularly prominent in the song "In a Different Place," the third track on the album.
The song begins with a single drumbeat, which is then accompanied by a light, almost glossy guitar chord. As these two instruments mesh, a bass guitar begins to substantiate in the background.
Then Andy Bell’s vocals come in. His voice, a strained hush, adds the next layer of falsetto harmony about which the rest of the song revolves in a steady current of aural captivation.
"Nowhere," the album’s last track, is also its most haunting moment. This song, a swirl of vapory harmonics and distorted guitar effects creates a panoramic of foreboding landscape and wonder. The lyrics, sedated more even than usual, reveal a struggling human consciousness and its attempt to find strength within the void of "nowhere" or rather, within a meaningless world.
Listen to this album in a dark room. I guarantee its sounds will be the vows that wed you and your headphones.
Catherine Wheel "Ferment" (Polygram/Fontana, 1992)
"Texture," the first track on Catherine Wheel’s "Ferment," is what I like to think of as an anthem directed toward modern musicians.
"You need to give me more texture!" chants the chorus line. It is an ideal welcoming to the album as it directly immerses the listener into the depths of the band’s ability to layer succulent melodies upon steel bass lines and concrete rhythms.
As the album continues, the band literally squeezes the last drop from every note, flooding the listener with thick, swirled melody. And just when the listener thinks he’s taken his last breath and the son is consuming him, drowning him with sound so rich, alluring, think, and captivating, the tide recedes and the listener stands speechless, dropping, amazed at what just happened.
Indeed, "Ferment" is a storm, a tsunami of immeasurable proportions that drenches, devastates, calms down, dries out, and picks right back up again consuming everything in its path.
This bridging of gentle tones and amped up madness makes the entire album a relentless series of F-5 tornadoes. It demolishes entire towns and at times miraculously leaves a house here, a flower there untouched.
It is in this that the real beauty of Catherine Wheel stands out – that is, their ability to make the inherent contradictions between pain and pleasure, silence and chaos, paralysis and lightspeed seem as interwoven as the threads that fuse a quilt.
"Ferment" is arguably the most powerful rock album I’ve ever been through, and undeniably a musical experience by which to measure all others.