My Bloody Valentine
mbv
Out: Now (Purchase Here)
"This is supposed to be the new world," X's John Doe and Exene Cervenka once howled with wry disappointment into the not-so-wild but very blue yonder. And so here we are: it's the end of the no-follow-up-to-Loveless world and I feel… fine? I think? As fine as you can feel after dropping $16 without hesitation for a digital copy of an album you never really thought would ever arrive, at least.
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An unhealthy combination of obsessive-compulsive perfectionism and reluctance to even attempt to follow the band's monolithic 1991 magnum opus kept My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields from delivering what fans simultaneously demanded and dreaded: a third album… two decades and countless false alarms in the making.
Now that (some) of the server-crashing furor has subsided, allowing mp3s to gently trickle down into hungry download folders, the pressing question arises: is mbv a worthy (or necessary) sequel to Loveless… or at least worth some of the interminable wait? The short answer: a nervous "well, yeah."
Update: Stream mbv in its entirety on My Bloody Valentine's YouTube channel.
For starters, mbv gets off to a somewhat shaky start. Anyone expecting anything resembling the faith-in-God shattering revelation of "Only Shallow" will undoubtedly find "she found now" (the song titles are all in stylized lowercase, so bear with me) a little... underwhelming. A lightly billowing cloud of gently buzzing shoegaze guitar and pre-requisitely indecipherable vocals, the album's slow-burning opener curls and coils around itself like a half-forgotten thought… never really heading anywhere but content in its cozy aimlessness. "only tomorrow" picks things up a bit, pairing a grinding, very-Isn't Anything guitar stammer with Colm Ó Cíosóig's first of several jazzy, shuffling drum arrangements.
Just as the initial disappointment sets in… just as heavy sighs wearing coats of acceptance begin to drop… then comes "who sees you," an exquisite corpse of Isn't Anything abrasion and Loveless spaciousness that, for lack of a better description, sounds exactly like what you'd always imagined the new My Bloody Valentine record would. Dare I say, it comes close to rivaling some of Loveless' finer moments… and kicks off mbv's thrilling middle act. From here, we move onto the startlingly Stereolab-esque and bafflingly titled "is this and yes" (seriously, how did this Emperor Tomato Ketchup outtake get in here?) and the womp-womping, lushly underwater-sounding "if i am," boasting maybe Bilinda Butcher's most swoon-worthy vocal tracks since "Blown A Wish."
Maybe it's because "new you"—a lightly funky, bachelor pad-friendly jam decked out in disarmingly mellow flanger-pedal strums—sets the bar at a preposterous high… or maybe it's because Kevin Shields is a sonic cuckoo bird and always has been… but mbv goes sharply off the deep end in its final stretch, starting with the squiggly, lurching noise-burst muck of "in another way," a guitars-as-laser-beams splatter fest that I can only liken to an old Space Invaders arcade game as smashed to bits with a baseball bat. "nothing is," elsewhere, wins the "hey, play this for your friends if you really don't want them to get what all the fuss is about" prize with its repetitive guitar drone (I mean "repetitive" and "drone" the way your mom means them… though I still mean "guitar" the way Kevin Shields means it) and vaguely '90s hip-hop drum machine vomit.
(By the way, and in case you were wondering, Kevin Shields wasn't kidding when he promised there'd be "slowed down drum & bass" on the new My Bloody Valentine album. It's called "wonder 2" and it sounds a little like a squadron of fighter jets flying over an Aphex Twin concert inside of a wind tunnel.)
I'll admit, it feels a little profane to offer up a first impression of mbv—it took 46 minutes to listen to it and another half hour or so to write this review… which, compared to the 21 years (and change) it took for the album to arrive, feels more than a little pithy. Needless to say, it's not Loveless—so removed is this album from that record's game-changing sound (and the world that surrounded it) that we may as well be talking about a different band. Maybe we are. Does the world feel a little different now that there's a third My Bloody Valentine album in it? Will the sun shine a little brighter? Will the sky seem a little bluer? It's just before midnight where I am now, so there's no real way to tell yet. In the meantime, though, I'll be taking mbv with me into my dreams-- the only place I know that looks, sounds or feels anything like a My Bloody Valentine record… old or new.
Grade: A-
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