My Bloody Valentine - Agony and Ecstasy

The British press, which above all else loves to slap on improbable, if not downright outlandish, labels, called them the “shoegazers” — for their habit, not even all that strange, of standing head bowed over their instruments during gigs, denying the audience even the slightest form of communication. The explanation could perhaps be found in the fact that the so-called “shoegazers” (bands like Slowdive, Ride or Pale Saints deserve a mention here) were at one with their music, or rather with their inextricable sonic clots, with their guitars overloaded with feedback and disorienting, stunning effects, with vocals and melodies barely sketched out, whispered and submerged beneath an ocean of noise.

The path was opened in the mid-Eighties by Scotland's Jesus & Mary Chain, but it was the Anglo-Irish My Bloody Valentine who elevated this style to its highest peaks. The recipe invented by Jesus & Mary Chain was extremely simple: innocent pop melodies in the purest British style, systematically and brutally violated by guitars distorted to the brink of noise. But where the Scots were still somehow tethered to the conventions of the “song”, My Bloody Valentine, led by guitarist Kevin Shields, pushed this sonic research into completely uncharted territory.

After years of EPs and lineup changes, the trajectory of the “real” My Bloody Valentine (that is, the quartet made up of Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher on vocals and guitars, Debbie Googe on bass, and Colm O'Ciosoig on drums) lasted for practically the span of just two extraordinary albums, Isn't Anything and Loveless. These two works contain the full, enormous scope of their innovation, a genuine revolution that would shape much of the rock to come: what Shields and his bandmates created is an almost inconceivable hybrid, yet one that became reality thanks to them — between the noise-warped harmonies of Velvet Underground and the fragile, dreamy ones of Cocteau Twins; My Bloody Valentine were garage-rock and acid-rock, they were the most lysergic psychedelia and the darkest dark-punk, they were a Beatles-esque pop band disguised as a “radical” noise band, and vice versa. They were everything and its opposite, all at once.

The story of My Bloody Valentine begins in the early Eighties in Ireland, right in the midst of batcave culture, under the sign of gloomy dark-punk scenarios. It's in Dublin that Kevin Shields and his drummer friend Colm O'Ciosoig make a name for themselves under the name Complex. The two then move to Berlin where, in 1984, they recruit singer Dave Conway and keyboardist Tina, releasing This Is Your Bloody Valentine on the German label Tycoon, a mini-LP under the band's new name (inspired by an old horror film). It's a dark, furious record, in the style of Birthday Party and Stooges. Their “gothic” background echoes through driving rock'n'roll tracks, poised between Cramps and Doors, like “Homelovin' Guy” and “Love Gang”.

A year later My Bloody Valentine are back in London with a new lineup (Tina out, bassist Debbie Googe in) and a new EP, Geek (still gothic-leaning, with dark tracks in the vein of Nick Cave like “No Place To Go” and “Love Machine”). It's then that Joe Foster of Kaleidoscope signs them for a series of mini-CDs. The first, the 12-inch The New Record By My Bloody Valentine, begins to bring Shields and co.'s musical project into focus: a crossover of psychedelic moods and fuzz guitars that still feels somewhat raw and approximate (the delicate, naive “Lovelee Sweet Darlene”).

A few months pass and another EP follows (Sunny Sundae Smile), before the new and definitive lineup change: singer Dave Conway departs, destined for a career as a science-fiction writer, and the striking guitarist and vocalist Bilinda Butcher comes in. With this lineup the band first releases the transitional Strawberry Wine, then the EP that would cement their reputation: Ecstasy, released in 1987 on Lazy Records in a run of three thousand copies, all of which sold out within a couple of weeks. Critics described the record as “a cross between Velvet Underground and Cocteau Twins”. But the main reference point is the sinister, distorted punk-pop of Jesus And Mary Chain, tempered by a psychedelic streak borrowed from Sixties acid-rock and a pronounced taste for the ethereal.

Preceded by the explosive single “You Made Me Realise”, Isn't Anything arrived at the end of 1988, the first true album by Shields' band. Playing on the hypnotic effect of distortion and on “glide guitar” (an exaggerated tremolo effect), My Bloody Valentine mapped out an intense journey of stupor, ecstasy and torment, tenderness and aggression — an emotional upheaval marked by the contrast between Bilinda's impalpable, pained voice and Shields' wall of sound-caked guitars. Tracks like “Soft As Snow” (echoing the Beatles of “A Day In The Life”) and “Cupid Come”, in the vein of Velvet Underground, still seem caught in the past. But “Feed Me With Your Kiss”, “You're Still In A Dream”, “You Never Should”, “Lose My Breath” and “No More Sorry” spell out the aim of their musical project far more clearly: reaching a sort of “acid nirvana” through hazy sonorities, ethereal drones, swirling dissonance. The lysergic sing-song of “Several Girls Galore” confirms their arrival in the territory of psychedelia. Thanks largely to this record My Bloody Valentine became an “international case”, starting to exert a considerable influence on the British indie-rock scene and laying the groundwork — alongside Cocteau Twins — for the new “dream-pop” generation.

Two more EPs followed (the languid Glider and the more mannered Tremolo), paving the way for the release of that Loveless destined to be remembered as Shields' band's masterpiece. A monolith of chaotic, layered, overlapping sounds that allows for no pauses, dragging the listener into a journey that is at once infernal and celestial. All of it orchestrated by the luminous, mad genius of Kevin Shields, who wrote, arranged and produced the album: and it's him again who, making extensive use of sampling and manipulation of every kind, managed to warp the music into a single, compact wall of disorienting, pounding sound, frequently brushing against pure avant-garde.

The opening "Only Shallow", with its blend of layer upon layer of unstable, quivering guitars, its chorus torn open by electronics, Butcher's voice as sweet and distant as an angel's (or a tempting devil's?), all carried along on a driving rhythm, is immediately representative of Shields' intentions. What matters is no longer the songs or melodies in themselves (though they are indeed beautiful in their simplicity), but the whirlpools of sound blended together into a single mass that could keep floating like this, weightless and formless, for minutes on end (it's no coincidence that live, the songs were stretched out to absurd lengths). "Loomer" is a track that in other hands would be terrifying, a potential hardcore anthem of tectonic force, but with My Bloody Valentine, thanks to the contrast with an increasingly ethereal, intangible voice, even the most aggressive noise becomes a kind of heavenly ecstasy.

The masterpiece within the masterpiece, a track that is more unique than rare and shows off Kevin Shields' genuine musical genius, is "To Here Knows When": an unprecedented and probably unmatched attempt at "chamber" noise. The melody is there, and it's exquisitely sweet, distant, almost subliminal, buried under tons of noise, while the guitar's extreme, formless distortion is paired here with an "artificial" string quartet — yet none of these elements clash with one another; everything melts together perfectly, with an unsettling naturalness.

The middle tracks are more conventional, fast and powerful as befits a proper rock song, though here and there they're furrowed and made "alien" by strange little electronic motifs: but then you hear a song like "Come In Alone" and, as if by magic, you're back in the Sixties, witnessing an imaginary duet between the Beatles and the Velvet Underground — yet another demonstration of how My Bloody Valentine's genius lies entirely in their truly unique ability to make seemingly incompatible things sound seamless together.

"Sometimes" also brings in acoustic guitar to accompany Shields' melancholy whisper, but the noise undercurrent is always there, looming and turbulent, ready at any moment to take over the song. Yet again, none of the contrasting elements overpowers the other: everything is still, as if in contemplation — it's the perfect balance between melody and noise, tenderness and violence, ultimately between order and chaos. Unexpected and beautiful, like a sudden shaft of light breaking through storm clouds, comes "Blown A Wish", a chorus of voices and sounds that seem to swirl in a dreamlike, unreal atmosphere, and here it really does feel like watching the magical Cocteau Twins grapple with the alchemy of John Cale. Another quick garage-rock burst, "What You Want", leads into the closing track, the lengthy "Soon", where rock 'n' roll flirts with technology and house music — an idea that would be explored almost simultaneously by Bobby Gillespie's Primal Scream (and it's no coincidence that Shields would go on to strike up a fruitful, long-lasting collaboration with Primal Scream themselves).

Once this masterpiece was released, My Bloody Valentine would slide into a phase of indecision and friction, which would lead first to Googe's departure (she went on to form Snowpony) and then O'Ciosoig's, until the band's eventual breakup. Kevin Shields would go on to collaborate with Experimental Audio Research and Primal Scream. With Bilinda Butcher, who vanished who knows where, he would maintain a fragile friendship, after a turbulent romantic relationship that ended in 1994.

Along with them, the great shoegaze dream would eventually fade too: an unfinished revolution of theirs, which within a few years would give way to the partial “restoration” of Britpop, with bands like Oasis, who would do nothing but trivialize and render utterly anonymous that fusion of distorted guitars and Sixties-style melodies which, above all with this album but also with their other works, and with those of their fellow travelers, My Bloody Valentine and the “shoegazers” had carried to extraterrestrial heights.

After numerous rumors, never confirmed to this day and dating back to 2008, suggesting the band was in the studio recording a new album, in 2012 Sony Music decided to gather into a single collection the last three EPs preceding Loveless (You Made Me Realise, Glider and Tremolo), together with a handful of rarities and three previously unreleased tracks. Released under the title EPs 1988-1991 as a double CD, the operation isn't too far removed from the one carried out for Cocteau Twins on “Lullabies To Violaine”, neither in type nor in importance. If the historical value of the two studio albums is indeed undeniable for the development, spread and discussion of shoegaze, the tracks “relegated” to the EPs of that same period largely manage to reach an almost equal level, suffering only from lesser renown due to their format of release. The true heart of the collection lies, then, far more than in the (non-)surprises of the unreleased tracks, in the reissue of songs of the finest caliber, which would not have been out of place on either of the band's two albums but which were instead released in a format perhaps unable to grant them the visibility they deserved. EPs 1988-1991, two decades on, brings into the light a collection of small treasures hidden in the enormous shadow of their two elder siblings, standing as a genuine listening guide, a sonic encyclopedia able to best describe the brief trajectory of one of the most important bands of the Nineties, filling a discographic void tied to a name that has now endured for more than twenty years and seems to be drifting ever further from any possible return to the scene.

After years of announcements and denials, finally on the morning of Sunday, February 3, 2013, the nine tracks of the band's great comeback were released online: MBV.

The record can ideally be divided into three parts. The first contains the songs that come closest to the style of Loveless. Among the first three tracks, “Only Tomorrow” stands out for its character, placed right after the hazy opener “She Found Now”. And it's immediately a deluge of electricity, a downpour of synths, the vocals left submerged beneath the musical magma — in short, everything that constitutes the band's trademark.

The second part of the album, running from track 4 to track 6, is the least remarkable stretch, though it still holds deep significance. Here you can catch whiffs of both Stereolab and a certain French Touch sensibility: "Is This And Yes" (and the following "If I Am" too) carries traces of Air in its DNA, as if Shields had borrowed something back from his transalpine disciples, who have repeatedly cited the Valentine as one of their chief inspirations. "New You" closes out this not-exactly-memorable central section, playing the role of the album's least distinctive and most conventionally pop track: objectively the weakest cut, the one where the experimentation is shoved a little into the corner. And it leaves behind the lingering sense of a comeback that hasn't quite taken off yet.

All of that is swept away by the closing sequence: from track 7 to track 9 we get the album's highlight, its most miraculous and daring zone, the one where the band sets to work in earnest sketching out vague hypotheses of new directions, finally crafting songs with real drive. "In Another Way" hits us with a mighty rhythm section, layered sonic architecture, and vocals you can't quite tell are running forward or backward, packing an enormous amount into a little over five minutes - enough on its own to justify all the attention this record has received. The instrumental "Nothing Is" amplifies everything to the nth degree: an endless loop in which, wonderfully, almost nothing happens, a wall of sound that hurls us back into certain lysergic 90s rave-party atmospheres. Better still is the closing "Wonder 2", the most thrilling, unhinged and reckless minutes on the whole record, the ones that finally convince us to award it full marks.

Contributions by Matteo Meda ("EPs 1988-1991"), Claudio Lancia ("MBV")

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