Loop’s second full album built excellently on the strength of their earlier efforts to rapidly gain both attention and praise among the burgeoning psychedelic underground scene of the late 20th century. With the ever shifting lineup now coalesced into a core trio of Robert Hampson on guitar and vocals, John Wills on drums and Neil Mackey on bass, Loop kicked off Fade Out with a fade-in, “Black Sun” starting with a murmuring flow of sound you could almost call proto-shoegaze before a simultaneously shimmering and shattering rampage fires up. Hampson’s vocal trademark of heavy echo and distanced intensity suits it all, adding a barely contained intensity to songs like “A Vision Stain” and the up-against-it slam of “This Is Where You End”. The Wills/Mackey rhythm section keeps the drive going throughout the album, deceptively simple but in practice near relentless; even on a song like “Torched,” where the guitars are almost crushing everything else, their work makes everything all the more frenetic. But as the head-nodding flow of the title track shows, the trio can downshift perfectly too.