REVIEW: Chapterhouse—White House Demos (2025)

First stirrings from early 1989 rediscovered, dusted down and released by Sonic Cathedral.

Some 32 years since I last bought a Chapterhouse release, here I am, listening to new music from the band. How is that even possible? Apparently this first recording session from January 1989 was entirely forgotten about until recently, featuring one song, See That Girl that was never featured on any subsequent album, or even anthology releases, and so makes its debut some 36 years after the fact.

It’s an iteration of the band they quickly left behind, sounding more like their take on the kind of wah-wah heavy psychedelic garage rock that bands like Loop favoured at the time—a far cry from their blissed-out hazy shoegaze style that they perfected on their stunning 1991 debut, Whirlpool.

Stooges influences abound on the eight minute opener Ecstasy—a song that has turned up in various forms on later compilations, but never in its extended eight minute form. It’s a strange thing hearing the band rocking out like this, amps up to 11, with straight-ahead almost Jim Morrison-esque vocal stylings. Given how quickly they changed lanes to a different style, you can very much understand why it fell out of consideration for their various EPs.

Guilt, meanwhile, is a song very well known to fans, as a key track on the debut album—but certainly not in this form. This is the raw sound of what the song would have sounded like live at the time, long before the demands of shoegaze toned down the raw guitar attack, and adopted a more soothing vocal approach.

It’s fascinating to see how a band’s sound can evolve. While I don’t agree with the idea that these sessions are “their best record”, as Slowdive guitarist Christian Savill recently commented, they certainly frame the band in a very different and interesting way, giving them a harder edge than many associate them with.

We get even more of that raw power on Die Die Die, a song most fans will associate with the rather incongruous limited 12” that came with initial copies of the debut. On that one, it was a near 12-minute shouty workout, and realistically nothing remotely like the album, and a strange inclusion, looking back. This White House version is, if anything, even heavier, pushing the vocals and guitars further forward in the mix, but taps out before the quieter section builds up for the final thrash on the released version. It’s real for the hardcore kind of stuff this.

I understand the motivation for putting this session out as a standalone EP, but given how much even a 12” EP costs these days (as much as an album), I do wonder why they didn’t bunch together all of their earlier noisy songs and issue it as a coherent LP, adding Need (Somebody), Inside Of Me, Satin Safe and Sixteen Years. Stylistically, all these songs fit together as a set, and would have made for an interesting alternative debut album. Sure, you can make you own playlist if you like, but they could have added a lot more value to this release doing it that way.