After making everyone wait more than two decades for a new My Bloody Valentine album, mbv abruptly landed on the band’s website last weekend. There were hints that it was on its way, but we’d had promises of upcoming new material several times in the past that came to nothing. Having been wearing this mythical status for so long, it was jolt that Kevin Shields and company had suddenly granted us access to nine new songs. Fans promptly crashed the website in their rush to get new material that might vanish as quickly as it appeared. But there it was and here it still is. The dream is real. The question is: will it push MBV’s stocks up or will a new body of music do them more harm than good?
The success of a comeback after such a long gap is largely dependent on the quality of the music itself and, thankfully, mbv is well on track with what has come before. The opening song, She Found Now, is almost disappointingly familiar on first listen, sounding like a lost track from the Loveless sessions. With Isn’t Anything and Loveless now such established classics, it’s easy to forget that their music has always taken its time to grow on you.
While it’s distinctively, unmistakably My Bloody Valentine (let’s face it, no-one else sounds anything like this, no matter how hard they try), the main change here is a looser structure and more playful take on their sound. You can feel the weight of the pressure in the songs but not in a negative way; it certainly doesn’t sound laboured or overworked. It’s less a layered, bewildering music-box; you can hear them working as a boxed-in, unsettled, disoriented group of musicians.
There’s wider variation moving further into the album. Is This And Yes drops the guitars and cuts Bilinda Butcher’s intimate vocals adrift on ambient organ chords, while New You is a sweet pop song and easily the most accessible thing on here. The last three songs on the album play about with scattershot jungle beats, the percussion taking the lead over the gauzy guitars, but everything a muddy, bloody glorious mess. Kevin Shields had been dropping drum and bass beats over layered guitars back in the mid-’90s and the eventual outcome is not as dodgy as it sounds. In Another Way is a particularly strong cut and marks a welcome shift in tone for the album’s final third, though the breakbeat crossover is a dated experiment that highlights the album’s main flaw: it only really sounds like a new album if the year happened to be 1993. It certainly isn’t an album that flicks a switch to mark a new direction, unlike Portishead’s also-delayed, self-consciously difficult Third album. But when it all comes together to form a record on par with the band’s highly original and influential efforts from the ’90s, you can excuse them for not being cutting edge.
BY CHRIS GIRDLER
Best Track: Only Tomorrow
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: Loveless MY BLOODY VALENTINE, Switched On STEREOLAB
In A Word: Valentines-Daze
