Giant Steps (The Boo Radleys album)
| Giant Steps | ||||
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| Studio album by The Boo Radleys | ||||
| Released | 31 August 1993 | |||
| Recorded | February 1993-March 1993 | |||
| Studio | First Protocol Studios, London | |||
| Genre | Psychedelic pop, Britpop, shoegazing | |||
| Length | 64:11 | |||
| Label | Creation CRECD 149 | |||
| Producer | Martin Carr, Tim Brown & Andy Wilkinson | |||
| The Boo Radleys chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Encyclopedia of Popular Music | |
| Mojo |  |
| NME | 9/10 |
| Q | |
| Record Collector | |
Giant Steps is the third album by The Boo Radleys, released in 1993. The title is inspired by John Coltrane's album of the same name, and the record features an assortment of influences — their previous shoegazing sound backed by pop, reggae, noise pop and orchestral sounds.
NME and Select named it as album of the year, and it was ranked as #1 in Fanning's Fab Fifty for that year. It reached the UK Top 20, but did not spawn a Top 40 single. Reviewing the album's rerelease in 2008, Sic Magazine wrote, "For 64 minutes they were the greatest band on the planet."
The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
In 2016, Pitchfork ranked the album at number 25 in its list of "The 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time", with critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine writing:
"The Boo Radleys' songwriter/guitarist, Martin Carr, named his band's 1993 album after John Coltrane's 1959 LP, but Giant Steps also is a winking acknowledgment of another kind: He's the first to know that the Liverpool quartet has taken a huge leap forward. Although they hardly renounce the thunderous swirl and delicate suspension of 1992's Everything's Alright Forever, the Boo Radleys treat that candied rush as an absorbed language, with Carr choosing to pursue a grand vision that unifies psychedelia, British guitar-pop, jazz, and dub. Part of the appeal of Giant Steps is that the Boo Radleys' enthusiasm leads them to attempt fusions that would scare away other bands: Witness "Lazarus," which begins with an elastic reggae beat before becoming consumed by sheets of guitars, wispy harmonies, and stabs of brass. "Lazarus" is essentially Giant Steps in microcosm, but the album gains strength through its own untrammeled ambition. At the dawn of britpop, the Boo Radleys chose expanding consciousness over provincial patriotism, and the results are still majestic."
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Wikipedia