Is Kevin Shields just %&*#$@! with us?

So we hear last year that a follow-up to My Bloody Valentine’s 1991 epic Loveless is nearly complete.  Then an interview with Debbie Googe in December reveals that the album is definitely coming out as it’s completely recorded.  By the end of December it was announced that the album was mastered and could be out any day.  Well, a few weeks have passed and at a live show over the weekend Kevin Shields announced onstage that the album would be out in “2 or 3 days” after a concert goer asked when the album would be out.  They even played a song off the new album with the title ‘Rough Song’ and despite the kinda crappy sound the song is very promising.

Very.  Promising.

So what’s all this mean?  It means that within a couple days we’re going to be able to download the long-anticipated follow-up to Loveless, or that Kevin Shields will scanter away back to his studio and tinker with it for another 20 years.  Hell, maybe he’ll just scrap the damn thing all together and start from scratch.  Or better yet, he’ll join Primal Scream again and say the hell with My Bloody Valentine completely.  One thing is for sure, with Kevin Shields you can never tell.  The only thing we can be sure of is his reliability at being sort of unpredictable.  I get it, he wants it to be just right.  Who doesn’t want their art to be perfect?  At least perfect in the sense that you’re offering a piece of you to the world, so you want it to represent what was in your head and heart in the first place.  I can understand that.  And I guess through the nineties and a good portion of the last decade he was in some sort of dispute with the record label or something, which held up any chance of hearing this follow-up.  But in the last 22 years he was legally tied up to the point of not being able to release anything?  Anything?  I don’t know.  I don’t buy it.  Personally, I think Kevin Shields is a perfectionist; to the point of being OCD.  Not even a damn e.p.???  Maxi-single?  Cassingle for Christ’s sake?  In 20 years?  What about a bunch of cassingles left randomly in bathroom stalls across Europe?  Mini-Discs distributed to rural mailboxes in Wyoming?  Adats randomly sent via DHL to persons named ‘Kevin’ and ‘Colm’?  That would’ve been cool.  But no.  Nothing.

So here we are.  The possibility of a new My Bloody Valentine album ready for download in a matter days.  I hope, hope, hope he’s not %&*#$@! with us.  And I suppose if he’d been putting things out randomly in the last 22 years the excitement and anticipation just wouldn’t be the same right now.  It’s pretty amazing, really.  An album 22 years in the making.  Obviously Kevin Shields is an amazing songsmith.  His ears hear things in a very skewed, woozy way that most of us just don’t hear things in.  I’m sure it takes time to create that purple-ish hued world that Shields creates(I’m surprised he can hear anything nowadays).  I’m ready for this record;  and I think, I hope, that Kevin Shields is ready to release it.  We shall see very soon.  Until then, here’s something to tide you over.