I've spent the last couple of months bashing HMV. First, their Boxing Day sale was a joke. Then, they eliminated the Club Cards. All the while, the prices had been steadily climbing over the last couple of years, and with rival Sam's having financial trouble I feared there was no end in sight. I decided to boycott HMV and their shameful overpricing. Indie stores like Soundscapes and Penguin Music have become cheaper than HMV for new CD's -- so why wouldn't I give my money to them? Cheaper is cheaper, and when HMV was it then I spent there proudly, but HMV's greed only encouraged me to contribute more to the indie record shop community.

It was going to take a lot for HMV to regain my trust, but sure enough, they did it with their 3 CDs for $33 sale. We're talking about an AWESOME sale, not just repackaging of jazz, classical, and indistinguishable greatest hits compos, but real variety and selection. Even at $15.99 each, many of these CD's are steals in mint condition (since most were several years old), but at $11 per, it's like finding the most kick-ass selection of used CDs in their original packaging. I went nuts, bought six discs, and I could have easily bought more. Where else can you get almost anything in the Cocteau Twins or Pixies catalogue for eleven bucks?

I'm so satisfied with my purchases that I'm going to discuss them here. With the first three, maybe I can find answers to a question which has been plaguing me lately: why do so many guitar noise bands eventually turn to quiet? Normally, musicians spout off that "we've done loud, now we want to try something different. Loud's been done, we don't feel the need to go back to it". Huh? Perhaps I need to form my own band to experience this. I'm sure lots of aspiring musicians watch Behind The Music, notice the pattern of a) musician works hard to make it, b) musician has fame, fortune, drugs, and debauchery; c) musician falls from grace, d) musician is happy now with a simpler life. And yet, being fully aware of the cycle that will entrap them, they still long to complete it, because they want to experience the highs and lows of b). It's only when you live through your wild period that you no longer desire the wildness.

There's got to be a reason why I never get tired of hearing Slowdive's "Avalyn II" but Neil Halstead did.

SONIC YOUTH -- SISTER. I've never heard the complete album until now. SY peaked so hard with "Daydream Nation", it's not even funny. For my money, SY are at their best when they combine their atonality with something both disturbing and beautiful. They were hitting all the right buttons with EVOL's "Expressway to Yr Skull". The swirling guitars were offsetting, nauseating, and yet the track lurches forward like the best classic rock and roll, only to have the storm subside and make way for a grey, cloudy night of dirge-y, ambient feedback. That classic RnR feeling, mixed with ambient churning and congealed experimentation (as opposed to loose and meandering) drenches "DD" as well, but "Sister" wants to be overtly experimental. Sudden tempo shifts, tunelessness, random noise bursts (symptoms of SY's early, unstructured work) are in abundance. Still, there's a healthy amount of the magic formula toward the second half of the record in tracks such as "Cotton Crown" and "Pacific Coast Highway". After their magnum opus, SY stayed in a holding pattern until "Washing Machine", and then advanced onward with the alluring Can-experiments on their own label, and the near-ambient "A Thousand Leaves".

LUSH -- SEAR EP. The book on Lush states that the more mainstream popularity they achieved, the worse the music became. This ep was their first release, when they were critics darlings/one of the zillions of bands trying to emulate MBV's "Isn't Anything". But Lush were the least noisy of the shoegazing crew. As their career went on, the guitars took more and more prominence, but they ceased sounding like a 4AD band.

This e.p. has a bit of everything (for 1990), swooning vocals a la Cocteaus, jangle-pop, and even a touch of baggy rhythms. The first two qualities remained with them throughout their careers, although they were bitten by the Britpop bug and lost their other-worldliness along the way. They sold out, so what?

MOJAVE 3 -- ASK ME TOMORROW. The tale of Slowdive, their morphology into Mojave 3, and slow return to commercial and critical respectability is one of the most fascinating sagas of pop, I say. As with Loop's transition into Main, they were noise fiends and later found themselves fiddling with near-silence. This album is like watching Rachel, Neil and Ian slowly and painfully crawl out of the smoldering wreckage of their defunct band. The music moves at a glacial page, which is practically the Indy 500 compared to the near cardiac-arrest of Slowdive's "Pygmalion". Not like that's a bad thing. My earlier reference to "smoldering wreckage" was "Pygmalion", not the death of Slowdive. This predated Sigur Ros by years.

As I'm typing this, the insistent humming from the speakers is easily audible. The hum is a different kind of noise, it's a lo-fi noise, but it is noise. The pastoral, rootsy style of the songs doesn't carry the emotional weight of the stark "Here She Comes" (from "Souvlaki"), but few songs do. "Love Songs on the Radio" is epic, but can't compare to the rush of the initial bars of Souvlaki's "40 Days". That's not to say that tracks such as "Pictures" didn't make me melt. The point is that before Mojave 3 was formed, Slowdive had found ways to move one's soul -- both with and without a high decibel count. With Mojave 3, it is only the latter, and even then, I found that the more serene the track, the more hum it contained, the more Pygmalion-esque it was, the better I liked it.

All three bands made their best work while they were still agents of "loud". However, they never exclusively pushed a "louder is better" theme. It may have been the contrast, the crushing highs nuzzling the anodyne lows, the "Here She Comes" leading into "Souvlaki Space Station" that have the strongest effect on listeners. Without that contrast, the quiet bits become tame and lull, rather than the jewels in the eye of the hurricane.

Thus, I have no definite answer to my original question. I need more volume. I haven't yet moved on to part c) in the chain.