My Bloody Valentine - m b v

I'm a male with indie-leaning musical tastes in his early 40s, so it's not a surprise that I was excited by the news that My Bloody Valentine was FINALLY releasing their followup to Loveless. Where I differ from my peers is that, aside from "Soon", I wasn't anywhere near the band's bandwagon during their heyday. About the time that they were turning themselves into a legendary bastion of 90s alternative music, I was transitioning from industrial music to rave music and the descendants of early house and techno; all of my focus was on 808s and 909s and the few guitar bands I regularly followed were holdovers from high school. I really liked "Soon". I appreciated my friends' appreciation for My Bloody Valentine. I always chimed in with positive comments when the band came up in conversation but I never actually listened to them.

This changed over the summer of 1998. I was spending the summer working in DC, commuting back to Boston over the weekends; this meant that every week I was traveling to and from work in a company-sponsored rental car, often with a CD player. I took this travel opportunity to both explore new albums, which is one reason why I own about a bazillion terrible drum n bass compilations, and catch up on bands I felt I should know better. My first exposure to "Only Shallow" was driving back from Tower Records in Tysons Corner, windows rolled down blasting at top volume. I spent some time kicking myself for resting on name recognition and spent most of the rest of the summer luxuriating in feedback.

I write all of this to say that I come to MBV as more of a dilettante than a True Believer. I was excited by the prospect of a new album but I hadn't spent 22 years sitting on the edge of my seat, gobbling up hints of progress here or there or going bonkers over a Kevin Shields appearance on a Primal Scream album. (Granted, he helped them do their best work since "Slip Inside This House" but the degree to which Primal Scream is overrated is another post.) This was an album by a band I liked that had been on an indefinite hiatus and I was interested in checking it out.

So, with all of that prelude out of the way, let me say this; m b v melts my face. I love the feedback and I love that its main function is to muddy up pretty pop songs. I love that the album opens with a comforting droney piece that makes it seem like the past 22 years never happened, followed by "Only Tomorrow", a song that keeps one foot firmly in the shoegazing dream pop that made the band into cult icons while turning up the complexity in the songwriting. I have listened to the coda approximately a bazillion times and I don't think I'll ever get tired of it. The album builds from here; "Who Sees You" continues the fuzzy exploration of stately chord progression, followed by the static beauty of "Is This And Yes", followed by more mid-tempo melodic twistiness in "If I Am". The album spends most of its running time effortlessly showing off why so many people on the younger side of middle-aged became so obsessed with them, alternating between knowing pander and gentle prodding into an expanded vision of what people think My Bloody Valentine is all about... up until the final three tracks. That's when things get real.

"In Another Way" bumps the BPMs up a notch, bringing to mind a more aggressively melodic iteration of "Soon". This is just a palette cleanser for the pummeling fury of "Nothing Is", an exercise in how stasis can represent fury. This leads into album closer "Wonder 2" which I'm not going to even bother describing beyond saying it's delirious, disorienting and makes me hope that I'm not 62 before the next MBV album arrives.

My Bloody Valentine - m b v at Pitchfork