Loop - Sonancy (Deluxe Edition) (2022)

Review by Fred Thomas
In their first iteration in the late '80s and early '90s, British drone rockers Loop explored the darker side of the psychedelic, guitar-driven sound that would mutate into shoegaze. Some of their contemporaries may have experimented with caustic guitar tones and druggy, hypnotic rhythms, but few achieved sounds as angry and overpowering. Sonancy is the fourth Loop full-length and the first in over 30 years -- following a breakup in 1991, a brief re-formation of the original lineup in 2013, and a complete reconfiguration of the band with guitarist/vocalist Robert Hampson as the sole remaining original member. The ten tracks that make up the album don't exactly aim to re-create the heavy sonics Loop made their name on decades earlier, but they don't stray too far from the group's original spirit, either. Opening number "Interference" is a two-chord workout, with fields of feedback and buried electronic textures blasting along over a repetitive Krautrock drumbeat. The heavy riffing and high-tension monotony of tracks like "Supra," "Halo," or "Fermion" come closer to the sound of earlier Loop songs, but there's a new level of clarity and detail. That's speaking relatively, of course, since Hampson's vocals are still swimming in delay and processing, and arrangements come through as a barrage of impenetrable noise. Even still, the murky confusion that defined the first three Loop albums gets a considerable cleanup here, with the band exploring harsh high-end guitar frequencies, fuller production values, and a wider gradient of distortion sounds. Some of the ambient tendencies Hampson spent years between Loop albums investigating with his project Main show up in the production here as well. A web of hard-to-place tones interlock as instrumental "Penumbra II" creeps into existence, with an unchanging beat serving as a guide for formless drifts of what sound like synth tones, feedback drones, and eventually other rhythmically inclined guitar sounds that fade in and out of the mix. The creeping lurch and distressed fuzz damage of final track "Aurora" bring the likenesses and differences of previous phases of the band into clear focus, closing out Sonancy with a sound that could fit anywhere in the Loop discography but feels especially visceral, more dynamic than ever, and somehow new.