my bloody valentine

Collection of three pioneering my bloody valentine albums on Domino Recording Co.

Isn't Anything

My Bloody Valentine's debut studio album inspired an entirely new approach to recorded music, inspiring countless acts in the following years. If 1991’s Loveless was My Bloody Valentine hurling themselves into an amniotic abyss of sound, 1988’s Isn’t Anything originally released on Creation Records represents the mounting vault before the plunge. A hugely ambitious debut album in its own right, all the consummate pieces of Kevin Shields and co’s ruthless experimental sensibilities are on monumental form throughout Isn’t Anything, succeeding in sounding completely singular over 30 years later.

From the opening snare thuds and the very first liquid metal guitar squall on ‘Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)’, My Bloody Valentine state their claim to Sonic Youth’s jagged crown, but as the joint vocal deliveries of Shields and Bilinda Butcher unfold across this precious trove of avant-rock gems, a lovelorn pop sensitivity akin to Teenage Fanclub and The Jesus and Mary Chain shines through, paired with the discordant chord turns and flurrying sweeps of ‘Lose My Breath’ and ‘No More Sorry’. Resonances of the latter can be heard in subsequent works, but the song presented here shows that My Bloody Valentine’s intimate knowledge of how to turn pedal effects into limitless moments of splendour was already fully-formed.

Lucid experiments and pioneering production techniques are cemented on this seminal shoegaze release from one of the genres pioneers.

loveless

The success of 1988’s Isn’t Anything propelled My Bloody Valentine into the sphere of shoegaze fame, the masterpiece that would soon follow in 1991 would launch the group into the rock ’n’ roll pantheon. 19 different studios, a handful of engineers, whispers of a steep £250,000 bill and a bankrupt label later, Loveless would essentially be the last we’d hear from My Bloody Valentine for over two decades. But even its notorious history is overshadowed by its immense invention and monumental beauty.

It only feels right to call Loveless an elemental record. Besides provoking the collective imagination of pedal enthusiasts all over the globe with its visionary, pitch-bent reinvention of guitar music, the blistering limitlessness of ‘To Here Knows When’ reverberates through the body like a mysterious force of dynamism, an unthinkable stack of amplifiers jacked into an exploding star. Beneath the powerful tidal waves of ‘When You Sleep’ and ‘Come In Alone’ lies a deep, heartbreakingly romantic pop bedrock, a form of bittersweetness designed for big rooms and headphone spaces alike. Meanwhile, ‘Sometimes’ remains the definitive introspective indie rock slow-dancer, its acoustic-driven bedroom aesthetic belied by a towering wall of distortion.

Intimacy and universality go hand-in-hand on Loveless; it’s sequenced like a tailor-made mixtape coyly handed to your crush, best experienced in one sitting. A record thats unique sonic capabilities still holds immense influence across a multitude of genres still to this day, some three decades later.

m b v

In the year 2013, 1991’s Loveless, as well as its 1988 predecessor Isn’t Anything, had already been claimed as two of the finest albums ever produced within the shoegaze movement and beyond. The legacy of My Bloody Valentine had been left to gestate for many years, and murmurs of a third record circulated, proliferated then vanished once again. It seemed as though the group would remain as elusive legends, locked in the studio with producer and guitarist Kevin Shields obsessively tweaking the knobs of his pedalboard for the rest of time.

Then, out of the blue, came m b v, and despite the gulf of years, My Bloody Valentine were emerging back into a world over which they still held dominion. The opening guitar sweeps and windswept melody of ‘She Found Now’ re-enters the amniotic sound-world of Loveless without redrawing its boundaries, billowing with a scorched sweetness carrying itself across to the noise monsoon of ‘Who Sees You’. My Bloody Valentine sound mighty and powerful even when they’re being playful, the unbreachable wall of enveloping noise on 'Wonder 2' sounding like they've run the pedals through a jet engine.

There’s no doubt that perfectionist Shields still hears its faults, but m b v is about as perfect a shoegaze record as there is, and a galaxy-brained statement for the outer limits of psychedelic music.