Whirlpool by Chapterhouse

Whirlpool, Chapterhouse's first album, came out on Dedicated Records on 29 April 1991, and it's the Reading band sinking all the way into the shoegaze swirl. Andrew Sherriff, Stephen Patman and Simon Rowe had started the group in 1987, school friends who'd grown up going to see the Cocteau Twins and the Jesus and Mary Chain and who cut their teeth sharing bills with Spacemen 3; by now Russell Barrett was on bass and Ashley Bates on drums.

The guitars pile up into a warm, whooshing blur, the voices float half-drowned in it, and a loping groove keeps things moving rather than merely drifting. "Pearl", the only single, is the high point. The album spent three weeks on the UK chart, peaking at 23, and years later Pitchfork put it at 17 on its 2016 list of the 50 best shoegaze albums. Only one more album, Blood Music, followed.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.