My Bloody Valentine Reissues in May
After reading for years about My Bloody Valentine reissuing Loveless, Isn’t Anything and their Glider and Tremolo ep’s, it seems that it’s actually happening. It was announced that Kevin Shields is finally putting out the remastered reissues of his late eighties/early nineties seminal albums. I can remember reading about the Loveless remaster six years ago. Trolling the internet trying to find a copy, I found nothing but dead ends. I guess there was a good reason for that.
Loveless is an album that is known for it’s tape hiss and woozy analog dreaminess. The idea of hearing that wooziness fussed over and that dreaminess more in focus is a exciting one. It was just those elements that gave that record its magic. You had the feeling of floating along a cloud of ether and numbed pain. The record took two years to complete. It was way over budget. The band was in a state of turmoil, due to personal relationships and copius amounts of drugs. But once Shields and company finally put it out in 1991 it was unlike anything we’d heard before. Vocals drowned in layers upon layers of guitar noise and squall. The guitars were an almost inpenetrable wall of feedback and over-modulated chord progressions. This was a record that caused a kind of aural sea sickness. It was the same feeling you got when you were 5 years old and sat on the Sit And Spin, bringing yourself to unwavering dizziness. As ill as you felt, you crawled back in a drunken-like state and sat down again and again, spinning yourself into an altered consciousness. Loveless is that altered consciousness. It’s sensory deprivation inside your headphones. ‘Only Shallow’, ‘To Hear Knows When’, ‘Sometimes’, ‘When You Sleep’ and ‘Come In Alone’ were the soundtrack for the disenfranchised and lonely. These weren’t songs for the jocks and the popular kids. This wasn’t football practice music. These songs spoke for the kids that didn’t or couldn’t speak for themselves. These were mix tape nuggets that sparked conversation. 1991 brought us what is now affectionately(and unaffectionately) known as shoegaze. Many have come after, but none have ever truly captured what it is better than My Bloody Valentine did with Loveless. And once this album hit, MBV were out of here. Never breaking up, but never to put anything else out. Kevin Shields is the musical J.D. Salinger. Loveless was his The Catcher In The Rye.
With all this talk of the reissues, it’s also been stated that MBV could have a new album out in a few months. Per Shields, he’s been working on new MBV music with the band. We’ll see. In the meantime, we have May and the reissues to look forward to. Let’s hope Kevin Shields steps out of the studio long enough to put something new out. Or at least prove he’s not quite the hermit Salinger was. Even Salinger gave us Franny and Zooey before vanishing into obscurity.
Come on Kevin, give us one more. Give us your Franny and Zooey.
