Cities On Flame With Some Sort of Rock N Roll
Chapterhouse - Guilt (1991 / Shoegaze)
Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re fucking staring at our feet and grinding our teeth with this lesser talked about antsy shoegazer.
Ah, emotions. This whole newsletter is nothing without them, because music is nothing without them. Even the cold mechanics of the most robotic techno, or the harshest noise still contain some of that good human nectar we slurp up like little needy hummingbirds.
Funnily, I don’t feel the overwhelmingness of guilt when I listen to this song, and I imagine it was a throw away title because coming up with titles, if you’ve never done it, is a huge pain in the ass.
I feel guilt all the time, though. Product of my childhood. We’re all grown ups trying to unfuck how our childhoods fucked us up. That’s why that Spacemen 3 album always resonated with me: For All the Fucked Up Children of This World, We Give You Spacemen 3…That’s like a permanent epitaph etched into my psyche.
Guilt doesn’t sound like this to me.
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Chapterhouse, Moose…those are bands that don’t get brought up by all the young dudes (all genders / no genders) who are retrotripping all over that wonderfully bogus decade that gets lumped into the catch-all 90s. A decade both amazing and loathsome for anyone who lived through it, just like every other decade that someone was a teenager in since the birth of popular culture. Young people in the 40s probably didn’t reminisce about the imagined 20s they never lived in. But around 1960 it seems the nostalgia may have kicked down with more force. Maybe a combination of the horrors of Vietnam, plus the rapid upswing of technological advances that could wipe out both the social fabric as well as the living breathing humanity we can’t imagine planet Earth without?
I don’t profess to have a clue. That shoegaze whatever still hits me like a bullet to my pineal gland.
Guilt. Solace. Youth. Posturing. Cigarettes at a coffeeshop at 3 am trying to write useless words.
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