A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
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A Head Full of Wishes newsletter #16
[273] Various artists - Still in a Dream
Cherry Red Records have been trotting out these extensive compilations for a number of years (as have some other reissue/legacy labels like Ace and Two Piers and Rough Trade) and I suspect AHFoW related acts have been sprinkled around many similar collections. Both Galaxie 500 and Luna turn up on this one, which is subtitled 1988-1995 A Story of Shoegaze. I’ll spare you a discussion on my opinions of music pigeonholing - but imagine me rolling my eyes!
I guess I bought this comp, and none of the others because:
- It has a pretty good tracklisting across its five CDs
- It has tracks by both Galaxie 500 and Luna, and also a track by The Belltower (one of Britta’s pre-Luna bands)
Obviously Galaxie 500’s and Luna’s contributions aren’t anything I don’t already have… multiple times. So I guess reason #1 is the best reason to have this collection.
The collection is packaged as a book and had a lengthy essay on shoegaze (that doesn’t mention Galaxie 500) by Neil Taylor - and little puff pieces on each track, neither the Galaxie 500 or Luna ones have anything insightful to say so are not worth me copying them down!
So… just because - I’m going to pick my three favourite tracks from each of the five discs†!
Disc 1
- Galaxie 500 - Tugboat (obv)
- Kitchens of Distinction - The 3rd Time We Opened the Capsule
- Pale Saints - The Sight of You
Disc 2
- Lush - De-Luxe
- Cranes - Inescapable
- Bleach - Decadence
Disc 3
- Th’ Faith Healers - Gorgeous Blue Flower in My Garden
- Spiritualized - Run
- Curve - Ten Little Girls
Disc 4
- Swallow - Sugar Your Mind
- Spectrum - True Love Will Find You in the End
- The Belltower - In Hollow
OK I picked this video (which does have In Hollow towards the end), for other reasons - as follows:
- Outshine the Sun (which is better than In Hollow)
- Britta looking gorgeous with dark hair!
- Britta making eggy bread!
Disc 5
- Drugstore - Alive
- Luna - 23 Minutes in Brussels
- Seefeel - Plainsong
Plainsong is from Seefeel’s masterpiece Quique and is the best track on this album (with the obvious exception(s))
Here’s a Spotify playlist of my picks
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 10/169
- Artist: Various artists
- Title: Still in a Dream
- Packaging: Hardbacked book
- Format: 5xCD
- Bought from Amazon for £35.99
dd_† Restricting myself to three per disc means no room for so many great bands - also I could easily have picked different tracks on each run through - I haven’t though too hard about this!_
[274] Luna - Penthouse (CD)
Luna’s masterpiece 3rd LP Penthouse was released in the US† on the 8th August 1995 which means that this week is its 30th anniversary… it surely can’t be that long! This is my CD copy of the album that was the first copy I owned and therefore got an awful lot of play!
I must admit that is another of the odd occasions when a post isn’t random… but I did only think of squeezing it in on its anniversary a couple of days ago so this is both hastily thrown together and a cut and pasted rehash of the post I made five years ago for its 25th anniversary - so, don’t bother clicking that link and just read this post instead!
Here’s some of the press which was, obviously, very postive!
Laura Lee Davies in Time Out, August 1995
In the opening “Chinatown” and the lilting “Moon Palace” the album sprawls its soft, sleek self out like a pet waiting to be adored
[…]
Whatever the mood, though, “Penthouse” is Dean Wareham’ achieving low-slung, urban cool without having to try too hard, which is the only way it should be done.
Stephen Dalton in NME, 12 August 1995
It’s a safe bet that Dean Wareham’s record collection is huge,meticulously catalogued and cross referenced to death. His anal fanboyapproach has often stymied previous Luna outings with AOR staidness,but now, perhaps mindful of this, he’s made his most feisty album yet.The Prozac has worn off, his eyelids are propped up, and Luna areready to rock. Sort of.
Mark Luffman in Melody Maker, 12 August 1995
“Penthouse” is one of those records with its own internal logic, one of those records that, for one delicious moment, shifts your perspective. After playing it, the next dozen records you play, no matter what they are, will all sound strangely WRONG.
Dean was interviewed about Penthouse for the Life of the Record podcast
It was a good time to be in Luna. We were having fun, I think. I mean not that there weren’t some struggles in the making of this record, and was it a little more difficult than we anticipated. But yeah, I guess we took like, I’d say this record took seven weeks to make, which was certainly the longest I had spent making a record. But that’s nothing compared to some other people. When you’re signed to a multi-record deal to a major label, there’s this impetus I suppose to get off the road and you’re like, “Ok we better make a record so we can get paid again” (laughs). There’s good and bad in that. It’s not a terribly good reason to make a record but on the other hand actually it is a good reason to make a record (laughs). It’s pretty understandable. And like I say, it gets you working.
Well Penthouse remains my favorite Luna record. It’s unusual that you hear a record that works from beginning to end and I think this one does that just kind of casts a spell and maintains this mood from track one to track ten. Often times, it’s just like two interesting songs and a bunch of filler. But I think this one, Penthouse, really captured us at our best.
The always fab NYCTaper has a couple of recordings of Luna playing the album in full:
In October 2015 Luna played Penthouse in full for the first time in Atlanta.
In October 2019 Luna played three albums over three nights at The Bowery Ballroom, here’s a full download of the Penthouse show.
The album, famously, turns up in Rolling Stone’s 100 best albums of the 90s
Dean Wareham made his name with the Eighties dream-pop trio Galaxie 500, but he really found his muse in these scandalously beautiful guitar ballads. His foxy voice slinks along the languid guitars as he plumbs his foolish heart in the back of a New York cab, going home alone after another night of fancy drinks and lucky toasts. Wareham purrs some sly one-liners (“It’s no fun reading fortune cookies to yourself”) but the music celebrates the pleasures of being too young, too rich, too pretty and too single, shopping for true love while getting lost in Chinatown.
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 10/013
- Artist: Luna
- Title: Penthouse
- Packaging: Jewelcase
- Format: CD
- Bought from whereever I bought CDs in 1995 for whatever they cost!
Previously in my record collection:
† - While back then US albums were released on Tuesdays, albums in the UK were always released on a Monday so it’s likely that Penthouse was released on either the 7th or the 14th August - the fact that the two reviews from the UK inkies were in editions dated 12th August (and therefore published on the 9th) I’d be inclined to guess the 7th (so they were already in the shops when the reviews came out).
This week in history
8th August 1995 - Luna’s ‘Penthouse’ released
Happy birthday to Luna’s Penthouse released on this day in 1995 - as covered above but here are a few more Penthouse related items:
- Back in 2017 when Luna played a three night residency in SF playing a different album each night I threw together collections of live recordings of each album… because it’s what I do. Here’s Penthouse with recordings from 1994 to 2016.
- Joakim reviewed each of those shows for AHFoW - here’s his review of the Penthouse show - “To Bonnie and Clyde the drunk girls in front of me are having fun, waving their hands in the air. Everybody is moving, dancing, sometimes it’s nice to not be in the front because you get to see all the people and their reactions.”
- Rock That Font had a short interview with sleeve designer Frank Olinsky - “Dean had discovered Ted Croner’s magical photos of New York City and knew they were just right for the package. Three pictures were used: the cover photo of the lit-up skyscraper, a group of light-streaked high-rise buildings, and a blurry speeding taxi.”
This week’s discoveries and rediscoveries
- Back in May, while on their west coast tour, Dean Wareham and his band popped into the KEXP studios in Seattle and recorded a session. The video of the session is now available to view on KEXP’s YouTube and has the band playing three tracks from his new album “That’s The Price of Loving Me”, plus “The Last Word” from his previous album, and finishing up with a cover of Galaxie 500’s Snowstorm. There’s also a short interview.
There are also a stack of lovely pics by Renate Steiner from the session on Flickr.