Sonancy by Loop (2022)
Travis Elborough
In early 2022, I got a new passport. My old one had lapsed during covid and in what turned out to be entirely misguided anticipation of a slew of overseas travel in the wake of lockdowns, I’d applied to renew it. In the process, I’d unearthed my very first full passport from 1990. It was one of those original too big for your jacket pocket, dark blue jobs so beloved of fucking Brexiteers. And there I was in the little square Photo Booth picture, aged 19, with a mop of untamed. shoulder-length hair, with a paisley scarf wrapped around my neck and an embarrassingly large hoop earring in my left ear, and wearing a suede jacket, which may or may not have had Western-style fringe-ing on it. I had a couple of suede jackets back then, one with fringe-ing, and one without, and in the picture it’s not clear to me which one I was wearing. In the new 2022 version that finally arrived after some delay and dark blue again too thanks to Brexit but manufactured in France, I appeared older, puffier and greyer obviously – I was 51 after all. My hair was a little, but actually not that much, shorter or tidier, and another different, but remarkably similar, paisley scarf was around my neck with a tan barn coat this time covering my shoulders. No earring thankfully. Nor any suggestion of Western-style fringe-ing on the jacket. Everything and nothing had changed in between these two documents. I was the same man and not, at the same time.
The week that I got my new passport also saw the release of Sonancy, the first new album from Croydon psyche post-rockers Loop in 32 years. Amused by the synchronicity, I posted my passport pictures on Instagram, tagging them something like ‘self in between Loop albums’. Loop had been one of my favourite bands. There was something primordial about their music, all blissful heavy repetitive bass riffs, basic neanderthal drums, waves of fuzzed up and phased hypnotic guitars, and often barely audible vocals that drifted ethereally in and out, like snatches of a failing radio signal. The funereal-paced “Forever”, on their debut album Heaven’s End, with its crashing snare drum, thunderous bass line and a distorted arpeggio guitar swirling in like fog, was drone rock at its most cinematic: widescreen, dramatic but also doomy, even mildly apocalyptic. Their subsequent two albums appeared to set their controls for a black hole rather than the heart of the sun, their driving, minimalist formula only becoming darker, sparer and more powerfully insistent. Its purest expression perhaps coming with “Arc-Lite”, the Can-esque non-album single built around a recurring bludgeoning blowtorch blast of guitar. And yet at the time, I recall a slight consensus, in the weekly, inky music press at any rate, that they’d gone off the boil and were stuck in a bit of a rut. Three years was long time in music in 1990, or certainly in music journalism anyway. Rave was in full swing. Grunge from the USA on the horizon. And given that purveyors of what would subsequently come to be derided as shoegaze, and the most obvious successors to Loop’s brand of psychonautical exploration, were circling like sharks, this is hardly surprising.
While I loved – and still love – their third and until recently final LP, A Gilded Eternity, a tombstone title if ever there was one, I do seem to remember listening to it less avidly than the previous two. Though I suspect that may have had more to do with the fact that it was pressed as a double vinyl LP but played at 45 RPM, which demanded more frequent trips to the turntable to flip between sides. A minor inconvenience obviously, but an inconvenience none the less that probably played a part in me playing it less often.
Still, around the time it came out I saw them at the Zap Club in Brighton, a cavernous venue in the arches on the seafront where they practically pummelled the audience into submission. Later that year, I saw them again at the Reading Festival where their set seemed to get somewhat lost in the open air of the Berkshire countryside and under the unforgiving light of the afternoon August sun. A few months later Loop were no more. And there were to be no more albums until Sonancy in 2022.
I almost wanted to say it feels like it could have been released just after A Gilded Eternity, so seamless seems the join in their sonic palates. But that’s not really true. It can’t be. Because that’s not what happened after A Gilded Eternity and time travel doesn’t exist. Nothing can sound like 1991. We’ve all travelled too far since then. Heard too much. Seen too much. Done too much and no one more musically than Robert Hampson, Loop’s founding and sole remaining original member. No one can go back there. Even if they wanted to. Only the council tax bands remain unchanged since that time; everything else is utterly irretrievable. And yet, and yet… it is uncanny. It is a record that distils the essence of everything the band did back then, all that mesmerising drone-y fuzz, jackhammer pounding and off-radar vocals are there in spades. But it does it with even greater confidence and finesse. It’s a record that could never have existed without the intervening 32 years and one that Loop could never have made back then even if they wanted to. It’s the same Loop but not, at the same time. It’s an album, it seems to me, about finding accommodation with the past in order to press on, as we all must do, ultimately, in the end. It’s already over two years old and we might have to wait another 30 for the next one. But god willing, I for one am up for waiting that long.
Travis Elborough is a writer, author and cultural commentator.
1990 passport photo below.
http://traviselborough.co.uk/
