My Bloody Valentine - m b v (self-released)
While no one was looking, it happened. Legendary early 90s UK guitar-noise pioneers My Bloody Valentine suddenly released their third album late last Saturday night, making mp3 copies available for purchase and immediate download on their website and, in the process, seemingly breaking the entire internet. The fact that m b v is their first album in 22 years has led to a lot of hype(rbole), and made it somewhat difficult to get a handle on what we actually have here. It's tough to say what will stand as the reality of the album, separate from all of the excited chatter, excess narrative baggage, and overwhelming expectations that necessarily greet an over-two-decades-in-the-making followup to a groundbreaking, epoch-defining album by an indubitably important band. But after a week of living with these songs, there are a few definitive statements I feel comfortable making.
First, I want to mention that any reference to a "22 year wait" for the release of m b v is extremely misleading. Most of the people I've heard making that reference are too young to remember the release of Loveless; they tend to be 20-somethings who were in grade school (or younger) when it first came out. I was 15 in 1991. I bought Loveless a few months after it was released, and loved it. I even saw My Bloody Valentine on their 1992 American tour with Dinosaur Jr (the show I saw turned out to be the fourth-to-last show they played before taking a 16 year hiatus from live performance). So I can certainly claim to have been a fan for the entirety of the 22-year gap between Loveless and m b v. Therefore, I feel confident telling you that no one spent more than the first few years of that time period waiting for a follow-up.
By 1995 or so, we'd all given up on the idea of there ever being another My Bloody Valentine album. The release of a couple of covers in 1996--a James Bond theme, originally by Louis Armstrong, and a Wire cover, both of which appeared on tribute compilations--was greeted with faint surprise but no real expectations. Singer/guitarist Kevin Shields's contribution of four solo songs to the soundtrack to Lost In Translation in 2004 was greeted with a bit more anticipation, if only because no one really assumed that My Bloody Valentine still existed as a band anymore. Solo tracks seemed like the most we could ask for, and it was certainly better than nothing. Then My Bloody Valentine blew everyone's minds by officially returning to the live arena with a performance at the 2008 Coachella festival, followed by a full-scale tour of America and Europe before the end of that year. Maybe at that point, people started really anticipating a new album, but the fact that reissues of the band's back catalogue were originally set for 2008 and took until last year to come out left a lot of people feeling jaded once again. The fact that less than a week passed between the announcement of a forthcoming new album and its actual release is extremely uncharacteristic based on previous behavior by the band. It is also, of course, a very welcome development.
Perhaps the strangest thing about m b v is that it's such an obvious sequel to Loveless. If it had indeed come out in 1994, it would have seemed like a perfectly natural followup. In fact, it sounds more like its immediate predecessor than Loveless itself sounded like its own predecessor, 1988's Isn't Anything. It's strange to hear more of a difference between two albums that were released three years apart than two that are separated by over two decades, but I'm not casting any aspersions on m b v by saying this. The new album doesn't sound dated, or stagnant. If anything, Loveless was ahead of its time when it was released in 1991. It sounded like nothing else going on in music at that time, and while a lot of bands, from Medicine to The Lilys to Astrobrite, have attempted over the intervening years to follow up on Loveless with albums of their own, none of them have come up with anything resembling what Shields and co. have given us on m b v.
But enough of the narrative--what of the sound? Well, for starters, it sounds like My Bloody Valentine. That's a statement that might baffle anyone who has never heard them before, but in truth, any attempt I make at describing My Bloody Valentine's sound for those who've never heard the band at all will certainly fall short. But I'll take a brief crack at it: swirling, distorted guitars dominate the mix. Breathy, melodic vocals that are sung and mixed in a way to make the actual words they're speaking totally indistinct are layered overtop of the guitar to provide greater melodic depth. Somewhere underneath these psychedelic waves of sound, a rhythm percolates--sometimes it's that of a pounding rock drummer, while at other times it sounds more like a programmed drum machine loop. But the overall impression is of a huge, irresistible wave of guitars washing you out to sea to drown in blissful vibrations.
m b v is just as dominated by the waves of guitars as Loveless was. However, it seems to be a more placid album, on the whole. The closest it comes to Loveless's more rocked-out moments, such as "Only Shallow" or "When You Sleep," is on "Who Sees You," the third track on m b v, which is driven by a grinding rhythm guitar riff and Colm O'Ciosoig's pounding drums. However, this track is slower than the heaviest moments on Loveless, so it still has more of a strolling pace than anything approaching the driving rock that was at one time one of the pillars of My Bloody Valentine's sound. I'm not sure that the diminishing of their prior rock energy is just a natural part of the aging process--after all, the four members of My Bloody Valentine were in their late 20s when they made Loveless. Today, they're all right around 50. It's not really that surprising for the current version of their sound to have calmed down a bit.
That's not to say that this album is full of ballads, though--it's just that when m b v gets loud, it does so in a very different way than earlier My Bloody Valentine work did. The album's last third has been getting a lot of attention for precisely this reason. "In Another Way" is the closest of the three final songs to the band's old ways of rocking out--rumbling along overtop of a danceable beat, the song is driven by more loud guitar riffs from Kevin Shields, which contrast with gorgeously floating vocal verses contributed by rhythm guitarist Bilinda Butcher. This track isn't too different from Loveless's "Soon," which closed out that album by pointing the way forward into a mixture of loud-guitar rock and beat-heavy rave euphoria. 22 years later, we've got the payoff here, with a song that will please longtime fans but could also probably drop into the playlist of a more adventurous club DJ.
You can't say that about the album's final two songs, "Nothing Is" and "Wonder 2." The former is a repetitive wall of noise, with layers of totally unmelodic guitars playing the same two chords over and over battling for dominance against the loudest percussion track on the album, an equally repetitive snare-driven pound that sounds somewhat like a programmed beat, yet seems too ferocious to be anything but a live drummer. Perhaps it's both. However, the only thing I know for sure about this track is that, as the two competing instruments battle, the overall volume increases more and more. Then, just when it's reached peak volume, the whole thing cuts off. The silence that follows feels like you've been dropped off a cliff, but when "Wonder 2" starts up a few seconds later, it's as if you've been rescued by a choir of angels--only they're flying helicopters. This song's whirring, phase-shifting percussion sounds show the clearest influence of the jungle and drum and bass records that Kevin Shields often raved about in interviews in the late 90s. There's no clear beat here--the multiple tracks of percussion, and the phase effect that most of those tracks have been run through, obscures any solid pulse--but while it's not danceable by any means, "Wonder 2" is a fascinating track to sit and listen to. The beats are the main reason why, but they aren't all the song has to offer, by any means. Vibrating tremolo guitar riffs and beautifully indecipherable vocals from Shields and Butcher give this song an even more layered feel, resulting in a sound that expands not only outward but upward, as if its helicopter percussion is reaching into the rafters of a sonic cathedral.
There are so many other worthwhile moments here to discuss, from the opening ballad "She Found Now," which feels like a sequel to Loveless's most obvious ballad, "Sometimes;" to the midpaced indie-pop of "New You," which is the surefire hit single if any of these tracks are; to "Is This And Yes," which reflects Shields's work with ambient textures in its hymnlike, minimalist organ-and-vocal arrangement. But the most important point to emphasize is that m b v succeeds at being a solid, enjoyable album. The night it hit the internet, a lot of people did backflips over the moon in reaction to their initial listens, and I think that's understandable. After all, 22 years is a lot of buildup, and for many, it probably seemed impossible to conceive of a finished product that wasn't somehow disappointing. All this album had to do to send a lot of people into rapturous paroxysms of joy was be non-terrible. Therefore, it's tough to see through the initial freakouts and figure out just how worthwhile this record is.
Unlike Loveless, it'll never be able to move mountains, change the way music is made and perceived, and establish a new paradigm--at most, a band only gets one album like that in its career, and most bands don't even get that. However, with m b v, My Bloody Valentine have offered the world a new chapter in its creative legacy, and done so without in any way tarnishing their previous work. People will calm down about this record soon, and once they do, there'll be a more honest re-evaluation that takes place. But at the end of that re-evaluation, I can't imagine that anyone who liked My Bloody Valentine before will conclude that m b v is a disappointment. It's a really good record, one that holds up when compared to the band's previous great works. After 22 years, it'd be ridiculous to ask for anything more.