Chapterhouse - Pearl

Pearl is considered a shoegazing standard, but to my ears it falls right on the borderline between shoegaze and Madchester-era Britpop.  With just a touch less drone it could be a Stone Roses song.  But fuzzy guitars and breathy, monotonous vocals plant one foot firmly in shoegazing land without detracting from the big Brit-pop hooks.

The result: one of the most radio-friendly shoegaze songs of all time.  A gateway drug to the world of fuzz.

Pearl notably samples not just one, but two, famous drum tracks.  The basic beat is a sped-up sample of John Bonham's masterpiece in Led Zeppelin's When The Levee Breaks, arguably the "heaviest" drum riff of all time (once compared by rock critic Chuck Klosterman to mammoths falling from the sky).

The other drum track is not really a sample, though many people think Chapterhouse stole the skritchy riff at 3:00 from Siouxsie and the Banshees' Kiss them for Me, which came out a few weeks earlier in 1991.  But a little digging finds the same beat in the 1983 rap song P.S.K. What Does It Mean? by Schoolly D.  Did Siouxsie and Chapterhouse both sample Schoolly?

Actually, no.  It turns out that drum beat was one of the prefab settings in the popular Roland synthesizer.  And it also turns out that producer Stephen Hague was working with both Siouxsie and Chapterhouse in 1991, and he must have liked the sound of it.

For those of us who were listening to alt rock radio or MTV back in 1991, that beat takes us back to a golden age.

The video below, of a shorter radio version, displays both the best and worst excesses of the shoegaze era. With its almost pornographically lingering close-ups of singer Andrew Sherriff, it strikes some viewers as charming, open, guileless, and timeless, while others just want to punch him in the face.