My Bloody Valentine: the Nebulous Noise of "m b v"

My Bloody Valentine gave every reason to believe that the follow-up to the much-beloved 1991 album Loveless would never see release. For their vigilant fans, the reality of m b v was nothing short of earth-shattering. While I don’t have a decades-long investment in the band, my appreciation for My Bloody Valentine germinated in a slow simmer over the course of the last few years, which was culminating a few months before the album’s announcement. Fueled by my increasing interest, I was swept up in the excitement and ordered m b v through the official website at my first available opportunity.

All I really wanted was a CD, but this format was only available in an expensive bundle with an immediately downloadable version of the album. I was more than willing to wait until the CD arrived, but anticipation got the better of me. I downloaded the MP3s and burned by own copy to tide me over.  I pushed play, and:



It seemed like gibberish. I remembered how resistant Loveless was, so I tried to be patient.  Despite the many rave reviews it was garnering, however, I just couldn't seem to make sense of m b v. I felt a little disappointed, and I was uneasy when the CD came in the mail a few weeks later. I discovered, however, that the tracklisting for my burned copy was incorrect, and listening to m b v with the songs in the correct order was an entirely different experience.

As it turns out, m b v is more varied than its predecessor.  There are thunderous experiments that border on noise, and kicking off the album with a warp speed thrill ride was not representative of the album's overall statement.  There are also instances of relatively straightforward pop songwriting, but most of it falls somewhere between these two extremes.  With the correct tracklisting, the album coheres incredibly well, which is a tribute to songsmith and guitarist Kevin Shield’s sense of the album's larger arc. 



So, same songs, different order, and the album instantly clicked into place.  Although it was not exactly the equal of Loveless, m b v revealed itself to be a believable extension of My Bloody Valentine’s limited oeuvre. For m b v to be successful in my mind, it had to recreate the delicate, inverted balance between impossibly overdriven guitars and sighing, whispered vocals of its predecessor without duplicating it too literally. Generally, this is the case. The layer of overdrive and distortion on m b v is like a high-fidelity recording of David Bowie's Low as it might sound pumped through a set of 10 watt speakers. It is so pervasive that it almost becomes a soothing silence – perhaps the loudest silence possible. Within this cloud of fuzz lay sighing vocal lines whose exact language is all but obscured in the din.



Although it is enjoyable at quieter volumes, m b v, like its predecessor, is really meant to be listened to loudly. It makes more sense when it envelopes the listener, like the slowly swirling beauty of hyperreal nebulas might surround a lonely deep-space traveler. This enveloping characteristic seethes with sadness and melancholy and gives this iteration of My Bloody Valentine’s sound an introspective, almost meditative quality that distinguishes it from Loveless.  It still, however, captures a similarly unique and heart-crushing beauty that sets it among the better releases this year.

The Peaceful Haze of "Half Dreaming"

I moved back to Austin in the summer of 2009 to an apartment complex that I now remember as idyllic. It was very clean and well-kept, our neighbors were mostly pretty realistic and mature, and my new wife felt safe enough to walk to the gym in the morning dark. It was quite perfect for us at the time, and it represented the promise of the new life we had begun to lead in Austin. Additionally, I was finishing my Master’s thesis in ethnomusicology, and I was riding a wave of academic momentum. As I began to break free of the constraints of my study, I focused that energy on the study of Asian music. I took Japanese language lessons the following summer and studied the shakuhachi as an investment in my potential future as an ethnomusicological scholar.

A few months after that move, Mew’s album No More Stories are Told Today…… was released, which subsequently reignited my interest in the shoegaze bands that they cite as influences. I was already giving My Bloody Valentine a second run, but they had me banging my head against the wall. I could sense that Loveless had more going on than I understood, but I was still looking in the wrong places. I thought I would branch out, and, inspired by my increasing interest in Japanese music and a couple of great experiences with global pop compilations, I discovered Half-Dreaming, a collection of Asian shoegaze and dream-pop.

Considering what I had learned about global popular music, and contemporary Japanese music in particular, I should not have been surprised that Half Dreaming bears very few obvious markers of Asianness. If you are looking for a localized twist on shoegaze, this will probably be disappointing. Asian popular culture, however, has historically been very adept at consuming and repurposing cultural material. Viewed in this fashion, Half Dreaming is an engaging (if somewhat inconsistent) representation of a contemporary Asian style that emerged through the appropriation of a relatively small British scene.

Now I must confess that my experience and knowledge of shoegaze styles is quite blinkered. It was only this year that I finally began to see the fragile beauty of Loveless, so I am hardly an expert. My newfound appreciation for that landmark album, however, prompted me to revisit Half Dreaming.

Distorted, reverbed guitars are often foregrounded on the album, smothering the vocals in a dense fog. Of course, emphasizing effects pedals over vocals in this fashion was a trademark practice of My Bloody Valentine. Their innovation, however, was their ability to preserve a sense of melody without actually emphasizing the melodic material, creating a sublimely amorphous wash of fuzz with just a hint of singability. A few artists on Half Dreaming cover up the vocals by simply drowning them in the mix, which I think misses the point. There are several cases, however, that are able to capture this delicate, inverted balance.



The wall of sound that is associated with shoegazey music can detach the text from the listener, but it also harbors the potential to liberate as its hazy boundaries spill over and beyond the artists’ desire to subjugate it to their narrative. There are a few tracks, however, that apply this unique aesthetic to a more song-based approach, resulting in a compelling reinterpretation of 60s psudeo-psychedelia.



These tracks were the ones I more readily connected with back when I first got Half Dreaming, and now bring to mind otherworldly recollections of the white limestone walls and immaculate landscaping of that apartment complex.  Armed with a new perspective, however, my recent revisit to the collection has been more unilaterally gratifying.  

"Before the Dawn Heals Us:" A Rift Amid Real and Imagined

I was blown away by the songs I knew at M83’s recent concert, but there was also a lot of unfamiliar material that caught my attention. I walked away with a new appreciation for Saturdays=Youth and Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, as well as an intense and perhaps financially dangerous curiosity about M83’s back catalog. The next day, I took a stack of unwanted CDs to Waterloo and traded them in for Before the Dawn Heals Us. This has turned out to be a good move, because it sows seeds that come to fruition in M83’s current work.

I'd like to elaborate on some of my previous observations about the ways that disparate influences uniquely converge in M83's music.  Especially after getting to know Before the Dawn Heals Us, I think that Jean-Michel Jarre's ubiquitous influence on French synthesizer music is a factor. Despite his sometimes melodramatic stage presence, he did have a unique gift for thematic, ethereal composition that harnessed the limits of 70s synthesizer technology. He had his moments of intensity, but Jarre’s style was mostly ambient, which, at the time, defied categorization.

When you turn the volume up on ethereal, however, it evolves into the cosmic, which aptly describes the splendor of Before the Dawn Heals Us.  I think that My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, an album that just recently clicked for me, is the inspiration for this radiating intensity.  Before the Dawn Heals Us is a similarly beautiful work of sonic sculpture, but, in addition to its predecessor’s use of detuned and distorted guitars, it’s also carved from massive walls of organ and synths.



Before the Dawn Heals Us isn't really music to dance to, and it’s not music to sing along with, but it is music to take refuge in. This “synth-gaze” approach heads straight for that liminal space between the real and the imagined, where the listener can be empowered by a romanticized notion of the world, and also be justifiably disappointed and perhaps angry when the world doesn’t fit that ideal. This dissonance makes Before the Dawn Heals Us seem intensely personal, allowing it to translate particularly well to the inherently sullen isolation of IPod culture.



In retrospect, I’m sure fans of Before the Dawn Heals Us had difficulty accepting Saturdays=Youth. It is overall less concerned with songwriting and 80s nostalgia than its immediate successor. Its immense grandeur, however, lays the groundwork for Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, and in some ways it might even be more successful as a unified listening experience. It certainly provides perspective on a larger arc in M83’s creative path. Coupled with the concert, Before the Dawn Heals Us has clinched the deal on one issue - M83’s creativity and vision has moved them up in ranks amongst my all-time favorite groups, which, at this stage in the game, is a difficult echelon to break into.

My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless"and B-Rate Horrors

The primary agenda of Horror Remix is to take stereotypically clichéd B-rate horror movies and edit them down to just the kills and pertinent dialogue, but it also often features music and video mashups. I have discovered several great bands through Horror Remix shows, not the least of which is M83.  A few years ago, I had the privilege of attending a Halloween party that also doubled as a private screening. It was here that I first took notice of My Bloody Valentine when the Best Man commented on the similarities in their sound to Mew, one of many bands that openly cite them as an influence. 


When I finally picked up Loveless a few years later in 2009, however, I just couldn’t get it to click. The vocals seemed too buried and out-of-balance to hold my attention. Still, Loveless held some fascination with me because ever since then, the album has been caught in a loose, elliptical orbit in my player, showing up once every few months.

Recently, I came across a review that reframed the overall statement and subsequent influence of Loveless in my mind. So, on a pleasant afternoon during spring break, the Little One and I went for a walk on a trail behind our apartment and I decided to again try to give it a focused listen, this time on headphones

Considering the context for Loveless is imperative. It came out in 1991 when I was a freshman at UNT. In the summer of that year, I had a job at the Hasting’s in Barton Creek mall. Nirvana would not break for a few more years, but there was a feeling that the sound of the 90s was yet to be defined.  During this gig, I was opening my ears to Public Enemy’s complex sampling approach and the possibility that Nine Inch Nails was more than just a dance band.  Generally, though, I was still predisposed to the technical and conceptual prowess of progressive rock.  I was certainly not in a place where I could decode My Bloody Valentine's innovations.

In retrospect, there wasn't anything else that sounded like Loveless.  It represents an entirely different concept of balance than I would have accepted back then.  Despite the overall “loudness” of the album, the voice’s placement in its opaque wall of sound is actually quite fragile. The vocals are immediately perceptible, but the details of timbre paradoxically blend in with, and are swallowed up by, the surrounding environment. Like a fish swimming under the icy surface of a frozen lake, they are intentionally submerged in a unique, delicate world just below the surface.


Headset listening is often a disorienting experience. Wearing Loveless as a halo of distortion as I walked a trail devoid of human presence jarringly inverted the ratio of sound to silence. The album’s impenetrable guitar sheen gave me the sensation that I was beset from all sides. As the trees choked out the sky, I began to feel a slightly paranoid (and protective of the Little One) about whatever clichéd B-rate horror movie monster might be lurking in the bushes.