Had
Loop been present at Woodstock, they probably would have hatched a plan to obtain all the brown acid that
Wavy Gravy warned spectators not to take. After hearing his declaration that "The brown acid's a bummer, man!,"
Robert Hampson and his droogs would have likely gone incognito as security staff, offering to rid the concert goers of the bad trips waiting to be had. They would have procedeed to ingest what they could and record something like
Heaven's End, a filler-free release of warped senses and personal demons, inner-space blues, and psychotic dementia. It sounds like a vast toxic wasteland where all negativity is dumped by the soul. Simple, tense riffs repeat until a state of hypnosis and emotional emptiness remain. "Heaven's End" itself sounds like the soundtrack to a missing hallucination scene from Easy Rider; shifting and shuffling percussion and twisted vapor trails of guitar mutate into utter mush. Samples from 2001 pop up throughout the record, if the music itself wasn't enough to carry a prevailing sense of paranoia and claustrophobia. But all the late-'60s references become stifling in conveying what
Loop did. Along the way,
Loop gutted all the spiritual mysticism from
Can, taking their repetition. They also borrow
Suicide's minimal charge and early
PiL's wretched anguish, making something rather unique from their influences. Though
Heaven's End demonstrates a crystal clear indebtedness to Detroit's high-energy mayhem of the late ‘60s, it's actually the gunmetal gray sound of
the Stooges and
MC5 filtered through decades of urban decay.