Catherine Wheel: Search and Destroy

i never checked out much beyond their first two albums tbh but those two albums were my early '90s jam

i wouldnt venture much farther out tbh

adam & eve adam & eve adam & eve

wait: happy days is ok too. but only chrome and ferment are covered by the stuff i said earlier. i havent given adam and eve its due time, maybe, but it didnt really reach me when i listened to it before. the things i like about CW are missing from it

it's not shoegazey at all but it's their best songwriting imo

but basically the things i like about cw: unbelievable melodies

and the precise guitar harmonics in "delicious" fuck with my head at least as much as the vivid blurs on ferment

melodies, layers of guitar, awesome voice, naked emotions lol

same

and the words. even when they look stupid on paper, the words always sound great.

will say that the words on adam and eve are particularly stupid

haha well, maybe that's why i hated it

i'll commit to revisiting it tonight and seeing. also the solo album (s? is there more than one?) stunk imo. his shit just doesn't work for me without all the loud guitars.

"Delicious" is sooooo good. The singing is good, but the song maxes out going into the last chorus when the guitars and drums all explode together.

The duet with Tanya Donelly, "Judy Staring At The Sun" on "Happy Days" is great.

Peaked with chrome. Adam and Eve has some nice too but awful cringy vocals/lyrics

"Phantom of the america mother" is so horrible, it's like the worst coldplay song that never existed.

Wishville is atrocious

They were fantastic live

Adam & Eve is like a Pink Floyd that actually rock it's phenomenal, I'm drunk too

For Dreaming is such an astonishing song

i just realized (doi) that both iron maiden and catherine wheel are the names of medieval torture devices

oh shit

The first two albums and "Heal"/"Heal 2" are my personal CW canon. Everything else is superfluous (and/or plain bad).

I did/do love Catherine wheel, but things did seem to get progressively less interesting from album to album. "Black Metallic" is one of my all-time jams though.

I still love the first two albums, especially Chrome. I haven't heard the rest in a while but the more they moved away from vaguely shoegaze-y stuff, the less I liked them.

dude's solo album - lord no

"crank" is such a good song, the video on the other hand is really funny but kind of perfect in its 90s-ness

he lives in l.a. now and restores porsches.

not as cool as cousin bruce flying an iron maiden passenger jet around the world tbqh

yep. hes such a corny person but i kind of love him for it

http://www.thedetroitbureau.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Dickinson-with-Porsche-911.jpg

would drive

would annoy

i can't drive stick tho so back to the honda

[wtf you cant drive a stick?!!]

i've been thinking abut it a lot, that rob's way of writing lyrics is so talk talk-esque
like, reading the lyrics as a poem on a page, they're so cringey
but they're great, moving even, when combined with their respective tunes
sometimes it seems obvious that hes just making up things that sound cool and have so real meaning, or contorting words for seemingly no reason other than it sounds nice (like when he says "supeer" in crank when he could have easily just said another word like surreal or ideal or whatever)
i keep wondering if this is purposeful on his part, and thinking about how someone could go about writing lyrics that way
its so different from how i've ever operated, or heard songwriters describe their process
idk

i mean clearly its purposeful, i just dont know if thats his particular purpose

i really should learn to drive stick if i want to fulfill my vintage car dream.

yeah like:

there's a shark
shaped
fin
in the
water
of my dreams
an alli
gator screams
from the depths there

"call me crank"

what

lmao

it like hes just saying "fuck it, im going to write the words that make the melody sound the most powerful," idk

I love to steal this living steam
My head in someone's dream
I'm tired of sleeping

ok

^^^exactly!!

that song is like A+ example of what im talking about. i dont think hes just BSing lyrics, i suspect something else is going on

thats the same song where he says "supere" to rhyme with "ideal" and it is really, really weird

i like the corny lyrics he drops too:

Let's take a rocket ship to Mars
And anchor off the satellite for lonely hearts
Such a special place
In outer space

the corniest! i have to imagine that the song is written from a kid's perspective or something, i have no idea.

oh i should also say im def only talking about the lyrics on ferment and chrome

i saw this interview with him once where someone asked what kept him going and he said "at risk of sounding american, its fear"

superboy:

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
you up there on the screen
I'd be your future boy
my big eyed bird in the movies
I'd be your future boy
because if that is what you need
a cinematic boy like me
who'll come along and set you free
don't fear, superboy is here
and it feels good to me

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
as the wisdom runs
a boy should know his limitations
but I've talked myself through less
can I be your future pest
because if that is what you need
a sycophantic boy like me
who'll tell you things you really don't need
oh joy, I'm your boy
and it feels good to me
don't fear, superboy is here
it feels good to me

yes, they were great live

yeah but thats from adam and eve when the lyrics became less vague and less of a tool or whatever
like however hilarious those lyrics are, and they are, i do think hes trying to sing about a thing

i get what you're saying. yeah i mean chrome is one of my favorite early '90s albums and i will sing every lyric but i'm not sure i know what any single line really means but they sound great and "i get" what he's doing in the moment, even if i don't really get it.

from a p recent interview w rob

"I’m ashamed to say this was an interesting example of what happens when you come up with a melody line that can only be sung with certain words (because of how the words are constructed and how they affect the tone). As you can probably tell, the above lyrics do little to strengthen the focus of what the song is obviously about and are there purely as a supporting melodic device."
“Flower To Hide was another song where the lyric was very much dictated by the initial vocal gibberish that come up when coming up with the melody lines. It’s funny when this happens in songs because you feel almost guilty about not constructing a 'focused lyric' that nails in a witty, metaphorical, ironic way a particular slice of life. Songs often are born as an apparent compromise of melody and lyrical straightforwardness. This of course can yield some fantastic results. Flower To Hide is about something but I dare not say what because it might jinx it."