Secret Shine - untouched

With their third studio album due for release on Christmas day and their second album from 2008 still doing the business for me i thought it was time to rediscover Secret Shine's first album though we have to go back all of the way to... 1993. This was one of my all-time favourite releases from Sarah Records and having a listen to it for the first time in years i was reminded just how brilliant this album is.

This album put the band firmly into shoegazing territory of course with swirling guitars, delicate female vocals, feedback noise but the songs! Songs like "Temporal" (one of my favourite songs of all time) and "Into the ether" are just unbeatable. All the songs are really, there are no duff tracks on here. All the songs are just in varying degrees of brilliance. The production is good too with pounding drums with a bit of space echo and grinding guitar noise. I suppose some may say Secret Shine were just part of the shoegazing scene. But so what, the scene rocked as do this band.

• Untouched (Amazon)