Brian - Understand

Brian - Understand (1992)

Awesome and underrated indie-pop/shoegaze record, with tender harmonies, melancholic vocals and guitar arpeggios.

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Hatcham Social - You Dig The Tunnel, I'll Hide The Soil (2009)

Hatcham Social - You Dig The Tunnel, I'll Hide The Soil

Great alternative pop album with loads of melodical post-punk and early indiepop influences (Josef K, Orange Juice), cool basslines and sharp guitar sounds (The Fall).

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V. A. - Just Strap On Your Guitar, And We'll Play Some Rock'n'Roll

V. A. - Just Strap On Your Guitar, And We'll Play Some Rock'n'Roll

A compilation of guitar-based rock music made by me; these are some of the most beautiful guitar-driven songs I know. The songs belong to completely different genres, but the guitar structures shows many similarities, being based mostly on clean, jangly, arpeggiated chords and/or delayed sounds, since it's my favourite style of playing. Here's the tracklist...

1. The Ventures - Walk Don't Run
2. Motorpsycho - Sinful, Wind-Borne
3. XTC - Day In Day Out
4. Unrest - I Do Believe You're Blushing
5. Siouxsie & The Banshees - Spellbound
6. The Byrds - Renaissance Fair
7. Bloc Party - This Modern Love
8. Wild Beasts - All The Kings Men
9. Polvo - Vibracobra
10. The Cure - Lullaby
11. The Clientele - We Could Walk Together
12. Savage Republic - Walking Backwards
13. The Church - Antenna
14. Gravenhurst - The Western Lands
15. Brighter - Killjoy
16. The La's - There She Goes
17. The Wake - Torn Calender
18. The Wendys - Pulling My Fingers Off
19. The Wild Swans - God Forbid
20. Easybeaats - Friday On My Mind
21. Mercury Rev - Downs Are Feminine Ballons
22. Felt - Crystal Ball
23. Orange Juice - Falling And Laughing
24. The House Of Love - Shine On
25. Sonic Youth - The Diamond Sea (Edit)

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The Wild Swans - Incandescent

The Wild Swans - Incandescent (2004)

The Wild Swans were a Liverpool-based post-punk band. Their style was quite different from the one of bands like Echo & The Bunnymen, from whom they take inspiration. Their music consists in pompous singing, frantic rhythms and ultra-clean crystal-sounding guitars, constantly delayed and repeatedly strummed on the most high-pitched notes of the fretboard. The result is a dramatic sound, with some refreshing pop moments (like in "No Bleeding") and a constant dreamy/spaced mood. It's interesting how their music sound new, considering that some of these songs were made in '82: if you pay attention you can hear similar sounds and features in completely different bands, like Kitchens of Distinction, Disco Inferno or Explosions in the Sky.

This is a 2cd compilation of their early material: some songs are redundant (they appear more times in different versions, but they sound nearly identical) , but there are lots of great songs.

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Whipping Boy - Submarine

Whipping Boy - Submarine (1992)

This album is perfectly played, crafted and produced, with a dreamy sound that could wipe out 99% of their contemporaneous guitar-rock bands. It's a heavy psychedelic shoegaze record that forges beautiful songs with heavy (and I mean VERY heavy) guitar walls, soft tinklings and fast noisy bursts (like the ones we can hear in "Daydream Nation"), resulting great both in the soft clean parts and in the noisier ones. Maybe it's the only shoegaze album with screamed vocals (in track 7, "Buffalo").

Their subsequent release was the good "Heartworm", less heavy and psychedelic, more focused on dramatic alternative rock/grunge ballads. It was good but not brilliant as this wonderful debut album.

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Supreme Love Gods - Supreme Love Gods

Supreme Love Gods - Supreme Love Gods (1992)

This record is one of the coolest things of the early Nineties. Supreme Love Gods were an American band, but their music is mostly influenced by British underground trends of the late '80s/early '90s. The basslines are always funky, but the roaring and volcanic sound is located somewhere between the madchester sound and psych-rock/shoegaze, with some excursions towards acid-house. It's so cool that their mood is constantly trippy and spaced out, even if the music never ceases to be violent, chaotic and over-layered.

This album have to be rediscovered.

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Dali's Car - The Waking Hour

Dali's Car - The Waking Hour (1984)

Dali's Car was an unusual and unique band in the history of rock music. First, they were a supergroup consisting in two prominent new wave personalities, Mick Karn (bass player from the band Japan) and Peter Murphy (the singer of Bauhaus), and second they rarely met for the recording of this album, sending themselves tapes instead of meeting in a studio. The music is alien and misterious, like a mixture of ancient sounds and future melodies, with Karn's strange fretless bass groove and Mrphy's haunting vocals that combine together, creating something indescribable, both scary and fascinating. Karn provides all the arrangements (in fact he was the mind of this project, Murphy's was just the vocalist) and thanks to his skills we can have stuff like "Cornwall Stone", one of the best songs from the gothic rock era. The other tracks are less ambient-oriented and more groovy, but here is the biggest flaw of this record: the emphasis on rhythm and repetition makes the songs quite stagnant, in facts they keep repeating a single idea for their duration (about 5-6 minutes).

Such an experimental album was a commercial failure, so Dali's Car broke up: both Karn and Murphy dedicated themselves to their solo careers.

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