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

Hard: Hear