My Bloody Valentine - m b v (review)

By Mick Aneworderfan

I was 18 years old when My Bloody Valentine's Loveless came out. Back then, it just looked like music would have kept moving on in a constant progress. It just seemed natural: in 1979 Joy Division, 1983 The Smiths, 1987 Pixies, 1989 My Bloody Valentine.. it was just a matter of waiting to hear the next giant step forward... but after Loveless something went horribly wrong, at least for guitar music. It was just like the utter limit of evolution had been reached, and there was just nothing else to invent. The Americans started looking back with grunge, basically a watered down version of the Pixies for people to cool to lock themselves in the bedroom listening to their father's Led Zeppelin records. In Britain it got even worse. Blur's Modern Life Is Rubbish was the manifesto of a generation who was tired of experimenting and just wanted to have a good time. While nobody dared to say anything bad about My Bloody Valentine, all the other shoe gazing bands were subject to derision and were swept away by the reactionary tedious tide of Britpop, people so un-cool they wanted to sound exactly like the bands their parents heard at their same age. Music has never recovered since then, basically all the innovative energy was channelled into electronic and dance music, but nobody has ever dared doing anything innovative in guitar music, which became just bland and safe, or an imitation of former glories. My Bloody Valentine signed to Island Records, but the follow up to Loveless hasn't ever been completed in a sorry decline of paranoia which just meant a lot of money wasted.

In these last few years the band reunited to tour, but it was pretty understandable that nobody believed leader Kevin Shields when he said a record was about to be completed.
Well, it was! And it is amazingly excellent too. The ironic thing is My Bloody Valentine just sound like would have in the mid 90s, little or no changes are made to the formula, and yet they sound supernatural, and like coming from the future, for the simple fact nobody has ever dared to go further than them. So, by sounding like themselves 20 years ago, they just sound fresh and innovative, and a chord of theirs is enough to bury all the guitar bands of the last 20 years under their total insignificance. Any guitar record released between Loveless and "m b v" (that's how it must be written, and the song titles in lower case too) sounds now absolutely meaningless, like something just been made to entertain us in the meanwhile, but without any true ambition. The ambition is all here, in "m b v". My Bloody Valentine wanted to return with a masterpiece, and they did. The songs have amazing sounds and emotional melodies, nobody could have predicted such a return to form.

One might expect if Kevin Shields hasn't had nothing to say for the last 20 years, maybe he has just lost his inspiration and this new album would just sound weak, but it doesn't, it sounds like the record they should have released 20 years ago to save the music scene and just expose the Britpop retards for what they were. This is clear from the emotional start of She Found Now (oh, I'll use capital letters for titles after all), but it becomes definite and absolute by the second track, Only Tomorrow, a simple melody which might as well be a nursery rhyme performed with such a sheer perversion your mind starts tripping with no drugs. By the triumphant guitar finale, those few simple notes played with that passion show clearly the genius is back and ready to teach you once again how music can be made when you have true talent. Who Sees You, heavy sound and sublime tune, might as well be your favourite song on Isn't Anything or Loveless.

Unexpectedly, a psychedelic keyboard dominates Is This And Yes, as ethereal and sublime as the best guitar shoe gazing can be. If I Am sounds like a delicate interlude leading us to another small surprise: New You is as pop as My Bloody Valentine can be and in a fair world would be a hit single for weeks on heavy rotation on daytime radio. In Another Way is probably the best song of the album, the guitars are devastating like a hurricane and the acid melody is mind blowing, just when you think it's as good as it gets here's a solemn keyboard making it maybe the most beautiful My Bloody Valentine song ever, just what we've been waiting for these 22 years. There's more magic in "m b v": the heavy frenzy of Nothing Is light speeds us to the noise annichilation of the closing Wonder 2, a YouTube user commented "it's like surfing on a Boeing", and how appropriate. I just hope another user is wrong when he says "The sound of Kevin taking off on his spaceship for another 20 years".