Thursday, July 2, 2009

Bleach - Fast & Hard eps (1993, Musidisc)

Of all the Brit dream-pop bands that failed to miss the mark, Bleach were perhaps my favorite. Way back in 2007 when I started this thing, I shared their first two eps, Snag and Eclipse eps, now I'm sharing their final two eps. Sandwiched in between all these short form releases was a flooring full length, Killing Time, that stood head and shoulders with anything by their cornucopia of contemporaries (i.e. Lush, Chapterhouse, etc). It was so impressive, Bleach would've had a nearly impossible task of outshining it, but while there wasn't a proper LP to succeed Killing Time, these two eps are the closest we have to such a proposition.


By the time they got around to Fast and Hard, Bleach shorn the better part of their gauzy layers of tremolo and distortion. This was a trend that caught on with a lot of shoegazer acts, and not necessarily for the best. Bleach's cornerstone, that being the ranty sung/spoken vocals of Salli Carson, remained firmly intact, but as the quartet eschewed much of the amped-out headiness that made their previous records so viscerally great, there was a little something lost in the translation. Nevertheless, even with their usual roaring backdrop sonically manicured, another key holdover here is tension - something Carson revels in to highly persuasive effect. For further observations on these disks you can bone up on Fast here and Hard here. Shoegazeralive2 blog has a whole mess of Bleach CDs that are yours for the taking.

Fast
01. Teenage Monk
02. Hate Song
03. Cosy
04. If We Are Dead
05. Action Time
06. Relax (FGTH cover)

Hard
01. Fuse
02. Can
03. Dead Eyes
04. Hit on Me
05. Baby Toes
06. Fragment

Fast: Hear
HardHear

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Nice Blog Dear!! I love to Watch bleach episodes and I got all these episodes online and I have a great collection of this show. All things about this show are really great!!!

Michael Bojkowski said...

Dear carlo, it's not about the TV show you twat. Read the blog post. That is all.

Unknown said...

I love bleach a lot. I only have killing time and fast, and see them as up there with the likes of Ride. I never got how chapterhouse and slowdive, say, were more successful. I can only put it down to the relentlessness of the stuff i have heard. Hate song is a song that should have been a hit.

The Salvager said...

Any chance these could get a re-up when you get time?

spavid said...

The links have been updated.

The Salvager said...

Thanks a bunch!

Breizh63 said...

Hello

Any chance that you re-uo the links please