The best Chrome albums of all time
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(Credits: Far Out / Chrome)
According to Chrome guitarist Helios Creed, his distinctly warped guitar style was born from “listening to Black Sabbath on LSD on headphones” as a teenager.
It’s a succinct capture of Chrome’s sound to the uninitiated. Hailing from San Francisco’s vibrant musical underground in 1976, core duo Creed and Damon Edge would take punk’s raw volatility and slather their DIY sound with layers upon layers of garbled effects and studio trickery to create an unholy swirl of psychoactive acid punk. Nightmarish, discoloured, alien, Chrome scooped up the hippies’ psychedelic residue and laced their trippy post-punk interruptions with a perennial cosmic menace that could still snarl as viciously as anything from the city’s Dead Kennedys or Flipper.
Taking cues from Hawkwind’s hard-nosed, lysergic expanses, Chrome didn’t just gunk their punk attacks with dollops of synths and effects pedals. Their distorted sci-fi blast across their classic run soars across a heady and disparate mulch of styles and terrain, often scrambled into the same cut. Amid the noise sting can lie the remains of a decomposed disco tune, prog painfully stretched and distended, static-encrusted funk echoes, or even the gurgling gasps of a pop hook buried underneath their chewed-up tape experiments. Chrome were masterful conjurers of aural chaos without ever denting their taut, punk laser focus.
Edge would move to Europe without Creed in 1983, taking the Chrome moniker with him while his former guitarist and psychonaut comrade forged a successful solo career. With their eclectic mulch of electronic fizz and spaced-out rock, Chrome would inexorably skirt mainstream attention but endure as a signal across the alternative world’s shifting scenes, namechecked by Butthole Surfers on influencing their disembowelled projectile metal, as well as the slew of industrial juggernauts that exploded across the late 1980s.
Edge would sadly pass away in 1995, leaving Creed to pick up the Chrome moniker and continue to release successive albums with a roll call of original collaborators and new guests. Leaving an indelible yet fringe impact on the world of punk, new wave, neo-psychedelia, electronica, and whatever genre permutation you can think of, we delve into Chrome’s rich body of work and highlight the select few you must listen to pronto.
The best Chrome albums of all time:
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