My Bloody Valentine

The British press, which loves nothing more than slapping on unlikely, if not downright bizarre, labels, dubbed them the "shoegazers" — for their habit, not even that strange really, of standing on stage staring down at their instruments, denying the audience even the slightest form of communication. The explanation might lie in the fact that the so-called "shoegazers" (bands like Slowdive, Ride or Pale Saints deserve a mention here) were essentially one with their music, or rather with their tangled sonic clots, their guitars overloaded with feedback and disorienting, dazing effects, their 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 took this style to its most sublime heights. The formula invented by Jesus & Mary Chain was extremely simple: innocent pop melodies in the purest British style were systematically and brutally violated by guitars distorted to the brink of noise. But where the Scots were still tied, in some way, to the conventions of the "song", My Bloody Valentine, led by guitarist Kevin Shields, pushed this sonic exploration into completely uncharted territory.

After years of EPs and lineup changes, the arc 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 just two extraordinary albums, "Isn't Anything" and, of course, "Loveless". These two works contain the full, enormous innovative reach of their output, a genuine revolution that would go on to shape much of the rock to come: what Shields and company created is an almost inconceivable hybrid, yet one that became reality thanks to them, somewhere between the noise-warped harmonies of the Velvet Underground and the fragile, dreamlike 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, in short, and it's clear that their final, definitive sonic statement could only be a record that evoked and summed up thirty years of rock history while resembling nothing else ever produced in that history: a monolith of chaotic sounds, layered and stacked upon one another, allowing no pause, dragging the listener into a journey that is at once infernal and celestial. All of it orchestrated by the brilliant, mad genius of Kevin Shields, who wrote, arranged and produced the album: and it's Shields again who, making liberal use of sampling and manipulation of every kind, managed to warp the music until it became a single, compact wall of disorienting, hammering sound, often edging into pure avant-garde territory.

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 vanished from view. With them, in the end, went the great dream of the "shoegazers" too: an unfinished revolution that, within just a few years, would give way to the sad "restoration" of Britpop, with bands like Oasis, who did nothing but trivialize and render utterly anonymous that fusion of distorted guitars and Sixties-rooted melodies which, especially with this album, but also with their other work and that of their fellow travelers, My Bloody Valentine and the shoegazers had pushed to extraterrestrial heights. And "Loveless" will forever remain their manifesto: abstract art, a parallel dimension, a waking dream.

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02/11/2006