HÜSKER PÖLL: Warehouse - Songs and Stories

What an album. Bed of Nails is the only dud. Bob should've let Grant have another one in its place.

This album weirdly presages not just (aspects of) shoe gaze, but also the all-treble sound of a lot of '90s Brit rock.

That section *does* sound a lot like parts of Isn't Anything. I listened to Warehouse a lot right when it came out and very little since. Spot's production never bothered me, but these interesting bits wash out on the late records. I only tenuously heard a HU-MBV connection by the time the time MBV came on my radar a year after HD was kaput. If Isn't Anything pulls a lot from Husker Du sonics, it also lets go of traditional Beatles/Buzzcocks song conventions, which Mould and Hart kept emphasizing more and more. Like, "Feed Me with Your Kiss" is easy to imagine as a late Du track, with the storm of fuzz and drawled vocals, but what sets it free is the conceptual bit with the incrementing count of blam-blam-blams. "From the Gut" Huskers might have done something like that, but not the final stage of the band.

I always thought this captured something of shoe gaze:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzzP29fw930

fwiw "Psychocandy" came out two months later.

What other art-rock has a similar feel or plays in a similar space?

Maybe some of the songs with layered guitar segments on third and fourth Camper Van Beethoven albums?

(The self-titled one and Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart)

Very overdue, but thanks for all your replies (esp. bendy, Josh, tim). I realized in retrospect that Bob came back to this proto-shoegaze sound for Sugar (post-shoegaze?) which is kinda awkward.... yet I think the moments on the Sugar records that get psych-gaze are not sloppy enough for me to love, which is why I keep coming back to "No Reservations".

Ok hold on a second!

From a Kevin Shields interview on how he created the MBV "glide-guitar" sound:

So I'd been playing the song 'Slow', and previously I'd been using this reverse reverb which I'd read about in a Bob Mould interview

https://thequietus.com/articles/08745-kevin-shields-interview-mbv-my-bloody-valentine

lol, Josh in Chicago from 4 years ago upthread:

Apparently Mould was also doing proto MBV stuff (slowing guitars down, blending them) pretty early, which maybe in those days accounted for his stun guitar sound. I know Shields has cited a Mould interview for giving him the idea of using reverse reverb. Billy Corgan cites Mould, too.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, August 8, 2016 7:59 AM (four years ago)

I seem to remember reading in Tape Op or somewhere that it was a rackmount fx unit, Alesis Midiverb II that had a short reverse reverb setting that inspired the glide guitar sound.

Any deep Husker fans know of any earlier reverse reverb examples prior to "No Reservations"?

And what the hell is "stun guitar" anyway? The only other place I've seen it referenced is on Blue Oyster Cult album credits.

There's a guitar part during the intro to Eiffel Tower High that sounds a bit reverse reverbish

Also Don't Know Yet off Flip Your Wig has a lot of backwards guitar but whether or not that's rev reverb I don't know. They obv played the tape backwards for the cymbals though