Love And Rockets - Express

When Bauhaus fell apart, Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins did not go looking for more darkness. They formed Love And Rockets in 1985 as a clean slate, and by the time their second album arrived in September 1986 they had found something far stranger and more colorful than anyone expected from three-quarters of goth's founding band. Express is the sound of that freedom: a mystical, transcendental travelogue that swaps the shadows for psychedelia.

The record moves like a train picking up speed. "Kundalini Express" is the engine, a chugging, hypnotic single that turns a spiritual awakening into a railway journey, and "Yin And Yang And The Flower Pot Man" barrels along at a pace closer to punk than to anything in the trio's past. "All In My Mind" appears twice, once electric and once in a hushed acoustic version, which says a lot about the range on display. The band's own press release at the time pointed to the balance of light and dark, positive and negative, as the album's recurring theme, and you can hear it in every swing between fuzzed-out noise and open, sunlit melody.

Express came three years before the band's American breakthrough, but its reputation has only grown since. It is now widely credited as a psychedelic trip that helped lay the foundation for alternative rock, and it remains the moment Love And Rockets stopped being an offshoot and became their own band.

This Beggars Arkive reissue puts the album back on vinyl after years out of print, remastered by Sean McGee at Abbey Road Studios and pressed on a single black LP in a standard sleeve with the original eight-track running order.