Catherine Wheel - Chrome

By 1993, shoegaze was already being written off as a spent force, all pedals and no punch. Catherine Wheel had other ideas. Chrome, their second album, is the sound of a band taking the genre's swirling dream-pop and welding it to real muscle, trading some of the gauzy haze of their debut Ferment for sharper hooks and guitars that actually roar.

Producer Gil Norton, fresh from his work sharpening other alternative acts into arena-sized shape, pushes the band toward bigger and cleaner impact without losing the textures that made them special. From the surging opener "Kill Rhythm" to the shimmering "Show Me Mary," Rob Dickinson's soaring vocals ride wave after wave of Brian Futter's layered guitar work. The anthemic "Crank" gave the band its breakthrough, climbing to number five on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart and proving these songs could hit as hard as they floated.

More than thirty years on, Chrome stands as a crucial bridge record, one foot in shoegaze's ethereal origins and the other planted firmly in the alternative-rock firepower of the mid-'90s. It never got the commercial rewards it deserved, but it has endured as a fan favorite and one of the most fully realized statements in the band's catalog.

This reissue LP is pressed from the original masters via Fontana. A long-overdue return to vinyl for a record that has spent too long overlooked, and an easy essential for anyone who likes their guitars both beautiful and loud.