Ricky Gervais delivered a smart quip during an old XFM broadcast, ruminating on the insufferable eagerness of philosophy students to demonstrate their newfound, facile comprehension of heady concepts that have no immediate or compelling relationship with the real world.
“See that table? It’s not there, mate.”
With the arrival of mbv — My Bloody Valentine’s second album for two decades — critics are likely to go long on the corporeality of tables. The group’s definitive 1991 masterpiece Loveless is the Voynich manuscript of rock music. Indecipherable — and for that, inexhaustible — Loveless needs no successor. Brian Eno — the Kevin Shields before Kevin Shields — declared it the vaguest music he’d ever heard, and it is precisely this quality that invites us to backfill the missing specifics with our own experiences and emotions.
Popular music’s legacy is down to the weeks, months, seasons and years that pass between your initial and subsequent exposure to songs, to the process of acquiring and enjoying a self-curated library of favorites. By entangling itself in your environmental and mental landscape, pop music becomes a complementary aspect of your personal growth. It rides with you.
Pop still functions this way in many respects — it certainly tags along whether you want it to or not — but its chief delivery method in 2013 is designed to make us forget songs as soon as possible that we might select different ones, which is to say: more of them. Streaming has significantly eroded the bedrock needed for music to leave a qualified, lasting impact on a particular set of people at a particular time. Music was once a turn-based game — a dialogic pastime — with an evolving lexicon of genres, canons and legends, relayed and refined by curious and adoring fans and archivists. In that game, Loveless was Boardwalk.
Few great artists survive a great lull, a maxim frequently and cruelly reproved in pop music. Take the case of British rock mainstays the Cure, who regularly sold out fifty-thousand seat arenas from the mid-1980s. Following a world tour in support of their 1992 LP Wish — which debuted at number two in the US, placed a Top 20 single in “Friday I’m in Love” and sold over a million copies — the group fell apart. Four ruinous years later, singer Robert Smith released the directionless Wild Mood Swings as if upending his wastebasket in your living room wearing his signature wink. The record failed so completely that four dates on the Cure’s 1996 American tour were canceled for lack of interest. Forced to confront the onset of life as inveterate nostalgia, Smith delivered the conforming comfort of Bloodflowers in 2000, before settling into a more rational pattern of barrel-rolling fan festivals.
Some artists are less casualties of hubris and exhaustion than tectonic shifts in popular taste. Led Zeppelin, for example, could not exist in the 1980s, because Led Zeppelin were the 1970s, a decade everyone wanted over so badly, they tried to end it early with punk rock. With the technocratic promises of science fiction drawing closer in video games and personal computers, the 1980s exhausted itself in trying to look as little like the 1970s as possible. Yet life remained largely analog, and the dawn of a new decade still lent a distinct excitement — a hope, even a demand — for art and fashions that could mark the occasion. Had Kurt Cobain survived the 1990s, I expect the same process would have felled Nirvana at the turn of the millennium (or sooner). My Bloody Valentine —the exemplar of what is arguably the most codified, stringently samey genre (next to disco) in pop—has somehow cheated this fate.
The group’s first full-length Isn’t Anything was innovative, explosive and arresting, but much of it was ultimately familiar as druggy, droning rock n’ roll. Velvets, Stooges…in 1988 My Bloody Valentine were widely regarded as Spacemen 3 copyists.
By contrast, the undulating “To Here Knows When” — first issued on the Tremolo EP of February 1991 — will live forever as the most psychedelic, visually suggestive noise the world has yet known. It is the sound of a bracket clock chiming from inside a galleon wrecked on the ocean floor, as recorded by a microphone placed one mile above, in the eye of a hurricane.
When asked to list three desert island songs for a book about music writing, longstanding Pitchfork editor Mark Richardson and I both named “To Here Knows When” before the question was even finished. Few artists, albums or songs have commanded such persistent, subservient adoration from fans and snooty critics. I don’t need to live with mbv to tell you Loveless will not be abdicating its throne.
Founded in 1983, My Bloody Valentine’s parent label Creation Records propped up a succession of hyperactive underground trends as part of England’s indie revolution: noise rock, C86, shoegaze, acid house and baggy, later laying claim to the biggest name in Britpop, Oasis. Driven by the discomfiting impatience of founder Alan McGee, the label tended to parade rather than safeguard its successful acts. In 1991, Creation released a home video advertorial, The Story of Creation, a three-pronged promotion of Primal Scream (soon to release their masterpiece Screamadelica), Ride (who in the event came off as a sort of shoegaze pin-up band), and My Bloody Valentine. McGee was broadcasting the brand with an eye for the finder’s fees he’d collect on upselling his stable’s biggest names to the majors. Barring Teenage Fanclub, these three acts were all he had to gamble with in 1991, because his label was nearly bankrupt. The Story of Creation is Alan McGee betting the house.
The bluff worked: Sony took a 50% interest in the label, and a portion of its considerable debts. As for the bands featured in The Story of Creation, Primal Scream and Ride dove headlong into unpopular fascinations with the American South and West, and My Bloody Valentine simply disappeared. Kevin Shields has pinned this on writer’s block, smoking a lot of dope, and having lost the plot, but McGee offers probably the best explanation: “Some people have got this thing, almost like an illness, where they can’t finish. Kevin has that. He can’t physically say, ‘That’s it.’”
Following the band’s acrimonious divorce from Creation in 1992, Island invested something on the order of half a million pounds in My Bloody Valentine over the next five years. In exchange, the label received two songs. Both were covers, of Louis Armstrong and Wire. Kevin Shields spent most of the money on a cliché: his very own recording studio. Against the collective wisdom behind Island’s advice — every fucking band does this, there are too many fucking studios as it is, people have spent fucking decades refining them — Shields decided to start from scratch with a very dodgy property, and convert it to an electricity-devouring sonic temple. He might have looked to the prolific run the Cocteau Twins enjoyed in their studio, September Sound, but if so he ignored that Pete Townshend actually owned it, and had invested untold monies maintaining it since 1976. That is nearly twenty years of trial and error before the Cocteau Twins booked their first of many September Sound sessions.
In 1998, Shields binned his home studio recordings and walked away from My Bloody Valentine, positioning himself for the new millennium as the Jimmy Page to Bobby Gillespie’s Robert Plant. The two resurrected Primal Scream as a thundering noise-rock “arkestra,” and their supergroup of pre-Oasis Creation stars unleashed two searing LPs: XTRMNTR (2000) and Evil Heat (2002). mbv’s closet-cleaning loop “nothing is” clearly dates from these chugging Big Muff days. Despite his typecasting as the “glide guitar” genius, and the hopes of his fans, Shields did not loan Primal Scream My Bloody Valentine’s signature whale yawn.
Shields’ combination of drone tuning and whammy-bar portamento is one of the most beautiful sounds you can make with a guitar, but unfortunately for shoegaze cultists who’ve worshiped at its altar for the last two decades, it is also an unmistakable creative trademark. In the intervening years, prayer books both dazzling and rote have been added to the canon by various imitators.
My Bloody Valentine’s music is its own genre: it is observably distinct from shoegaze. Shoegaze is reverb-heavy, basic, and usually suffers from weak players and/or singers. Much as we love and have lived with various songs from Ride, Slowdive, Lush, Moose, Chapterhouse and the like, most shoegaze bands assiduously avoided the whammy bar for fear of being indexed as My Bloody Valentine Jr.
In America, that was never a problem, because shoegaze was never a certifiable genre, but back in England, you could get a fucking plus record deal as shoegaze chancers in the early 1990s. Look up Revolver sometime. Fuck me…
Stateside, shoegaze was a proposition, an inspiration. We had no claim to having influenced it but for maybe the Byrds. For this reason — for the distance we enjoyed from the reference material, socially and sonically — more of our bands embraced the trem arm, and open tunings, and produced the best tributes to Kevin Shields’ work. Lilys, Lorelei, the Swirlies, on through to “new gaze” metropolitan indie acts in the 2000s like Asobi Seksu and Fleeting Joys…somehow Americans understood the immutable singularity of Loveless could never be diluted by imitation. Twenty-odd years later, we can still enjoy their harmless love letters, and say with certainty they were right to write them.
mbv maintains the character that keeps Loveless immortal — to an extent that invites chastisement over a lack of stylistic ambition — but this is because My Bloody Valentine hinge on a deft understanding of the power of lazy phrasing. It’s not so much the sounds that remain the same, but their delivery. Slightly-late vocals are critical to druggy, downcast pop: it helps each measure blossom, each chord shift into focus. These rasping whispers are as important to My Bloody Valentine’s sound as the Alesis Midiverb II, the Yamaha GEP-50, or Fender’s Jaguar and Jazzmaster guitars.
Yet the most pervasive aspect of My Bloody Valentine’s sound tends to go unmentioned. Through the swaying pitch, bleary fuzz and hazy vocals, the creation and exchange of heterodynes — waves created by the collision of other waves — between each melodic component remain constant. More than phase-shifting or stereo panning, there is a palpable friction with heterodynes: they generate a physiological, auditory response, because the waves are produced as the song plays, and create an extra-musical, percussive force. Dance music fans will recognize them as disorienting “ring modulation,” those wincing tones that seem to make your ears blink, for lack of a better description. The second and third tracks on mbv — “only tomorrow” and “who sees you” — indulge in this parlor trick most overtly, aided by improved clarity through modern technology (the tighter sonic tension helps obscure the fact that “who sees you” is largely a rewrite of “Come in Alone,” from Loveless).
The only My Bloody Valentine song I’ve disliked from first listen is “Moon Song,” from the Tremolo EP. There’s something too-intoxicated and dashed-off to Shields’ vocals, and the congas tip the piece to exotica. The startlingly stark “is this and yes” — a VOX synth meditation central to mbv (perhaps played on a Continental 300?) — is a dare along similar lines, and paired with “if I am” represents Kevin Shields’ internalization of the late-1990s Krautrock/lounge boom, ushered in by Stereolab, refined by Broadcast…and cashed-the-fuck-in-on by the High Llamas.
Looking back, Shields had already tipped his cap to similar influences the first time around, in his forensic reconstruction of Hal David and John Barry’s “We Have All the Time in the World” for the 1993 charity compilation Peace Together. On hearing My Bloody Valentine’s version, someone at Guinness sourced the 1969 Louis Armstrong original for a beer commercial, and owing to subsequent popular demand it was reissued as a single in 1994, climbing to number three in the UK. Here’s hoping the Valentines got a few pints of gratis black out of the deal.
As did Talk Talk’s sweeping final albums (and, for a time, Slint’s murderous Spiderland), Loveless became a crusade among music critics, and today it rarely appears outside the top five of any best-of list on which it appears. Owing to this status, mbv must satisfy two generations of devoted fans: one raised on Loveless, and one subjected to its primacy. The band bridges not just the cultural landscapes of 1991 and 2013 but a human generation. Their first two records predate text messaging; the first SMS wasn’t sent until 1993.
Hyperbole infects every retelling of the inscrutable, shimmering, holistic, suggestive, captivating, resonant, overwhelming, singular, kaleidoscopic, disorienting charm of Loveless. Yet the album was still accessible as pop in 1991, and remains so in 2013. The same cannot be said of mbv, where odd tempos, inverted chord changes and a penchant for lengthy, repetitive finales shift the band away from the verse-chorus-verse conformity that kept Loveless in focus. The newfound, gnarling clarity of Shields’ guitar tracks is succulent, and the digitally excited throb of Colm Ó Cíosóig’s drumming makes a welcome return, but many critics have already noted — and I would concur — that the compositional and sonic unity of Loveless is missing. In its careering rush to embrace all the music that’s mattered to Kevin Shields since the early 1990s, mbv ends up a comparatively obvious record. It is a harsher assembly of colliding ideas, interspersed with breathtaking reassurances that so wondrous a band remains capable of the same wondrous things.
That said, I’m unsure whether mbv can technically be considered an album. The notions this music was borne of span nearly fifteen years, and given the band’s preference for — and success with — the EP format, mbv presents as a poorly-stitched quilt. The album cover does the band no favors on this score.
What we’re getting here is functionally three EPs of MBV’s established modes: erotic bliss, shimmering pop, and punishing noise. In his stop-start efforts to dote on each of these, Shields has suffered paralytic writer’s block at every turn, and his way out of it proves obvious across all of these tracks. It’s a timeworn method musicians have long used to break free of creative paralysis: play the tracks that aren’t working backwards, and write more parts, or even another song over them. The most glaring example of this trick is all those Stone Roses B-sides from 1988. mbv is almost that naked a tell in “she found now” and “in another way” —also the two strongest cuts on the album — wherein the changes from verse to chorus to bridge all occur in the middle of four-four measures, as the melodies collapse around them, resulting in 4/4 6/8 collisions that to the untrained ear could be compared to having a stroke.
mbv will never measure up to Loveless. It may not even matter. The record is a mere curio, but it will endure, especially when compared with so many wan reformation cash-ins from their peers. As a coda from a group so ingenious, so indelible as to expand the presumed limits and indeed the creative evolution of the medium in which they operated, mbv works as an evidentiary appendix. Of course it’s not Loveless reincarnate — as a piece of music, or a resurrection of the pre-Nirvana utopia My Bloody Valentine defined — and won’t be the terra firma staked out by a new generation of shoegaze fans, who, like the original article, are more concerned with celebrating themselves.
mbv marks the return of the king, but not his kingdom.