Taste by Telescopes

Taste, the Telescopes' debut album, came out on What Goes On Records in 1989, two years after Stephen Lawrie formed the band. Richard Formby produced it, with Ken MacPherson and Chris Bell engineering, and it is a noisy, woozy, feedback-drenched thing, all fuzz and menace and blurred melody, the sound of a band raised on the Velvet Underground, Suicide, the Stooges and the 13th Floor Elevators turning the amps up until the songs start to melt. "The Perfect Needle" was the song that reached the countdowns.

What Goes On later folded, so Cheree reissued it in 1990, and in 2006 Rev-Ola brought it back with live versions of "There Is No Floor", "Sadness Pale", "Threadbare" and "Suicide" added. Its reputation only grew: in 2016 Pitchfork put it at 47th among the 50 greatest shoegaze records ever made.

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