Catherine Wheel - Ferment

Great Yarmouth's Catherine Wheel spent the early nineties in an awkward spot: too heavy for shoegaze, too atmospheric for grunge, too English for either. Ferment, their 1992 debut, is the record that makes the case they were simply better than the scene they got filed under.

Rob Dickinson's vocals sit inside the walls of guitar rather than on top of them, and Tim Friese-Greene, fresh from years of work with Talk Talk, produced with an ear for space rather than volume. "Black Metallic" is the centerpiece, a slow-burning seven minutes of menace that drew the first real wave of attention. "I Want to Touch You," "Texture," and the title track carry the same muscular, hypnotic pull, and "Salt" closes the album on a note of genuine grandeur. It has since been ranked among the twenty-five best shoegaze albums ever made.

The band were of a size and standing to have a young Radiohead open for them, and reviewers at the time noted the two groups worked along a similar axis of catharsis and contrivance. Three decades on, Ferment sounds less like a period piece than most of what surrounded it.

This 2023 Fontana reissue faithfully replicates the original UK release on 180-gram vinyl and adds the three-track live 12" EP recorded at Bath Moles Club in November 1991, pressed on 140 gram. Housed in a gatefold jacket.