Surely the year's most anticipated and soon-to-be-celebrated release in shoegaze circles, Colour Trip is Ringo Deathstarr's debut album, and it was well worth the wait. It's rare that I want to tackle an album review on a track-by-track basis, but Colour Trip warrants that easily. The album is 55% spot-on homage to some of the mid-80's to early-90's best genre tracks, and 45% fresh and original blendings of those influences. The album kicks off in incredible style with Imagine Hearts, paying intense homage to early-90's Medicine a-la "Aruca", but with a constant whammy bar attack throughout the track's danceable rhythms. "Do It Every Time" takes off into stratospheric crunch-buzzsaw-guitars mode with lazy male vocals highly reminiscent of Paul Court's vocals on The Primitives' 'All The Way Down' (which, of course, referenced Psychocandy-era JAMC vox to boot). "So High" becomes an obvious and perfect choice for the lead-off single, given it's sunshine-gorgeous tribute to Strawberry Wine-era MBV, as it essential feels like a lost track from those sessions, replete with drop-dead-ringers for Kevin and Belinda's vocals, and snowsquall guitar jangle. The more-than-coincidence reference points and loving tributes continue in tracks like "Two Girls" (a wink and a nod - and a revved-up endorphin kick - to Drop Nineteens' 'Kick the Tragedy'), and "Day Dreamy" (a dead-ringer for MBV's Glider b-side 'Don't Ask Why'). Colour Trip's pièce de résistance is definitely Tambourine Girl. The track's initial 26 and a half seconds are an insane and intense grinding guitar+drums crunch-noise-bliss (unlike anything else since the jet engine blissblast of the transition in Fauna's "Groovy, Too"). This gives way in a split second to an irresistable C86-style propulsive straight-forward-time-signature Ecstasy & Wine era MBV type track for 20 seconds, then it's right back into the odd time signature intro, and then back again, seesawing a handful of times with increasing duration (and intensity), before the track ends all too soon at three and a half minutes in an analog tape-drag outro. Brilliant. The remainder of the album's tracks seem to find the band settling into their own groove by taking all their myriad excellent influences and blending them together in their own unique way. "Kaleidoscope" is rife with walls of blissful and distorted showgaze guitars and breathy vocals, but feels very fresh. "Chloe" has a male vocal lead with more catchy and danceable rythms and wall-of-fuzz guitars, but with all levels pushed into the red. "Never Drive" almost seems to take a breather, although still retains the noisy guitars and breathy/lazy male vox. Two tracks later the album closes out with "Other Things", a departure from the rest of the album with looped drum ryhthms, gauzy female vocals, and hazy intangible guitar clouds floating by. Colour Trip is an album that easily, comfortably, happily, and very proudly sits alongside all the albums referenced above. It doesn't beg to do so, but it knows it will.