By our special My Bloody Valentine
correspondent Neil McOnie
22 years after the release of their last, staggering, epochal album, My Bloody Valentine stumble a record out in the early hours of a cold Sunday morning, break their own website, send Twitter and the musicommentariat into meltdown and delight their entire, unwavering fanbase utterly. Of course they do.
m b v is an album in three parts, comprising three songs each. Some of it was recorded in 1993, some of it in 1996 and some of it the other week. It’s beautiful. I love it.
The first section delivers what many fans will have been hoping for and expecting. The three songs tread the straightest path from 1991 to now, reminiscent of the sonically dense parts of Loveless: more ‘Sometimes’ molten sludge than the shimmer of ‘To Here Knows When’. It is a thrilling welcome back for devotees of Shields’ warped, tremolo-heavy guitar trademark. When the lazy arpeggio punctures the thick layer of fuzz during ‘only tomorrow’, it’s as spine-tingling a drone as they’ve ever produced.
The middle section of the album sees the band lay off the fuzz and open the off-kilter pop stashbox. ‘is this and yes’ is four-minutes of pretty synth that could have been lifted directly from Shields’ efforts on the (BAFTA nom’d) Lost in Translation soundtrack, while ‘if i am’ bats around a cutesy call-and-response, Bilinda Butcher’s stoner-siren voice as mashed as ever. ‘new you’, played live recently in Brixton, is straightforward (for MBV) verse/chorus saccharine-pop, harking back to the 1988 vintage. I wasn’t at the Brixton gig, and I’d like to hear this at 130db, please.
The songs in the final third are the most exciting. Three urgent, percussion-driven stompers serve to remind us the band’s sense of adventure did not end as ‘Soon’ faded out. They owe most to Shield’s work with Primal Scream (or maybe that’s the other way around, given they may have been recorded in 1993). ‘in another way’ is strongly reminiscent of ‘MBV Arkestra’ (from XTRMNTR), and the album finishes with ‘wonder 2‘, a peculiar, panicky mix of lysergic vocals, drum & bass, and phasing aeroplane sounds.
The highlight in this section, however, is ‘nothing is’. The thumping repetition of its one-bar riff altered only by volume shifts, some subtle, some less-so, generates an effect so hypnotic that the song’s abrupt finish at 3:48 is genuinely startling. They should play it for forty minutes live. Or never stop.
After a few listens, the giddy excitement of OMFG IT’S A NEW MY BLOODY VALENTINE ALBUM!!! disappears, eclipsed by something more substantial and nourishing. It’s replaced by the complete enjoyment of listening to a band not finished exploring their otherworld, and not done returning to show us what they’ve found.
