Something I’ve been meaning to mention for a while and never quite getting around to … Pitchfork Media report that “My Bloody Valentine”:http://pitchforkmedia.com/news/04-02/09.shtml, very possibly the Best Band in the World, Ever, are releasing a bunch of stuff next year, including some of the material that never made it onto the Glider EP. Cause for celebration, if not quite as much cause as a genuinely new album would be. Pitchfork also has a nice piece on the demise of “Black Eyes”:http://pitchforkmedia.com/news/04-04/08.shtml, which featured my cousin, Hugh McElroy, as co-vocalist in its heyday.
{ 9 comments }
sacha 04.29.04 at 2:38 am
Slightly off topic, though still relavent, I’d thought I’d point out that this post made me feel very nostalgic, so I booted up WinMX to steal some music.
Doing a search, however, for My Bloody Valentine, revealed half the entries to be a single song by Good Charlotte (listed over and over), which I found depressing to a very high degree.
Paul 04.29.04 at 5:19 am
I bought “Loveless” for my brother about 10 years ago because he liked rock bands with female singers. I had heard the song “Only Shallow” on the radio, and I thought he might like the album.
He didn’t. He said it was “too noisy.”
Not wanting to waste the purchase, I gave the album a spin.
After scraping my cerebellum off the ceiling, I realized I possessed one of the all-time greats. In fact, a couple of years later, Rolling Stone listed it in their “All-Time Top 500” issue (not that it has any more credibility than any other “top whatever” list, but it was one of the few recent albums in that list, and it really was a selection out of left field).
Anyone who wants to investigate Kevin Shields’ output outside of MBV would do well to start here. Also, Kevin wrote a song for the “Lost in Translation” soundtrack.
I sure wish he could strive to achieve Frank Zappa-like levels of productivity.
Reg 04.29.04 at 7:07 am
I don’t get Bloody Valentine. All the other music I like suggests I should be a big fan. I can’t stand the shit. There is no melody, it is just noise.
What am I missing?
nick 04.29.04 at 8:15 am
What am I missing?
Your sense of hearing? There’s melody — there are about a dozen melodies, stacked up atop each other — and you just have to listen.
(And I have to thank Annie Nightingale for introducing me to ‘Soon’ back in 1991. Also, the MBV Arkestra remix of Primal Scream’s ‘If They Move, Kill ‘Em’ was worth the wait.)
nick 04.29.04 at 8:18 am
Let me clarify, reg: Loveless is one of those albums that justifies buying a pair of Grado SR60s.
felixrayman 04.29.04 at 9:28 am
My Bloody Valentine will be conducting music releasing program-related activities in the near future. Sure, sure.
I’ve been hearing that since the day I saw them in a concert that ended with them stretching out You Made Me Realise into a wall of feedback, playing the same chord for 20 minutes.
Yeah, it’ll be out real soon. And Spiritualized will put out a recording as good as their first one.
Any day now.
jack the lad 04.29.04 at 1:31 pm
“What am i missing?”
As the original poster said, MBV is *possibly* the best band in the world. Not to worry! Despite MBV’s greatness, The Smiths is obviously the best band in the world to anyone with two ears! That would explain your confusion.
Henry 04.29.04 at 2:16 pm
bq. _Yeah, it’ll be out real soon. And Spiritualized will put out a recording as good as their first one._
Fair point – but I reckon that the chances of a compilation of unreleased plus live stuff stands a better chance of hitting the shelves sometime in the next decade than a genuinely new album. Agree on Spiritualized (although for me the first two albums are interchangeably great – it’s with _Ladies and Gentlemen_ that they start going downhill fast).
Yeah – the MBV/Arkestra mix rocks – the best thing that Shields has done since ‘Loveless.’ I’m not so keen on his other remixes – Mogwai should have been a natural, but doesn’t quite work, while his version of the Pastels is anodyne. Haven’t heard the ‘Lost in Translation’ soundtrack yet though.
Tim Annett 04.29.04 at 3:53 pm
Henry, I think you’ll find that the “Lost in Translation” material is good, but not quite as good as you’d like it to be. There are hints of Shields’ genius for textures and simple, contrapuntal melodies. But I’m somehow left with the impression that those tracks, solid as they might be by any other standard, were somewhat tossed off by KS.
I had the good fortune of seeing MBV perform with Dinosaur Jr. way, way back when, and to this day I’m not entirely convinced that my hearing has come all the way back. MBV was singularly LOUD live, though surprisingly clear (at least when I saw them; I imagine if they were being handled by an inexperienced sound tech things could have very quickly turned disastrous) and I don’t know that I’ve seen many bands replicate that since. A show I saw Godspeed You Black Emperor do in the fall of 2000 at Bowery Ballroom in NY was close, in its sort of hypnotic power, but *only* close.
And while I’m of course a tremendous fan of “Loveless,” I feel as though “Isn’t Anything” is often unfairly overlooked. Those beautiful, scraping guitar bits on “Soft As Snow” still give me goosebumps.
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