★★★★★
Five Stars
In 1991 My Bloody Valentine released their album Loveless. The creative pinnacle of the shoegaze genre, it is widely regarded as being pretty much perfect. It is the paradigm example of the eternally lauded album, so much so that it has gained an almost mythical status. 22 years later and MBV have now finally released the follow up, m b v. Both the legendary status of its predecessor and the fact that it has been in the pipeline for longer than I have been on this earth make reviewing it a some-what daunting prospect.
It doesn’t help matters that any attempt at describing the music MBV make will be horribly inadequate, inevitably ending up clichéd. In fact you could easily create an automatic MBV description generator by randomly combining adjectives like lush, warm, soft, dream-like, swirling, hypnotic, ethereal, dizzying with nouns like noise, melody, layers/waves/walls of sound, textures, rhythms etc.
The first several tracks serve as an effortless reminder of the sheer beauty of MBV’s unique form of noise. That familiar omnipresent distortion and reverb washes over you; you hear
the searing guitar melodies and completely forget that this album has been 22 years in the waiting. Chronology becomes irrelevant when the music is this exciting. It is quite remarkable that MBV have gone so long between releases, and have come back sounding just as brilliant as when they left off.
The end of the album delivers the clearest point of departure from Loveless, the last two tracks are mind-blowingly weird, intense and difficult. Perhaps they make most sense as some kind of psycho-aural-experiments, almost closer in resemblance to contemporary art than anything conventionally musical. But in an age where so much music is so very boring, MBV’s commitment to producing radically original sounds should be applauded. m b v was always destined to be ‘not as good as Loveless’ and that fate hasn’t been avoided. But what is so much more important is the fact that noise hasn’t sounded this good in a very, very long time.
