Lughnasa
by Chimera (1990s)

From MadhattanJack 12/28/2025 05:37 | #312345

Chimera, from Northern Ireland, was criminally overlooked during the first wave of shoegaze in the early-to-mid-90s, and nobody ever went to jail for it, either. (Not even me, and I overlooked them completely.) That said, this album is quite different from their second, 1996's "Earth Loop" — it's louder and more uptempo, with more distorted, noisy guitars. It's much more like a "classic shoegaze" record, and yet it's nowhere near as good, for one glaring reason: Every single song sounds like the lead vocalist, Eileen Henry, was simply brought into the studio and told to do some sort of Tori Amos singing impression ("Show off that range! More high notes!") over the finished backing track with no preparation, no harmonies, and possibly no lyrics, as if she'd just met the band that day without even hearing them first. It's not bad if you listen to just one song at a time, but if you try to get through this whole album in one sitting, it's almost excruciating. The results are more like the first Smiths LP than anything else, except that with the Smiths you could at least understand the words, and Morrissey never had pretensions to being an opera singer. Apparently there was some sort of "contractual issue" with their soon-to-be-defunct first label that forced Chimera to pull this album from the record shops, and maybe that's just as well, though they were actually getting respectable sales numbers at the time. By the time "Earth Loop" was released, they'd fixed most of their songwriting problems and signed to a new label, but the new label quickly went out of business too, and the band — probably completely fed up at this point — called it a day.