Retrospectreview: Eight Years Later, m b v is Survived Only By Memories

Released: February 4, 2013

Shoegaze
(Alternative)
(Experimental)

For a guide to the gem rating system, click here.

Everyone has their own “moment” regarding this album, so here’s mine: on an early February night I was hanging out with the guy I was seeing, smoking weed and fucking around on his desktop. I had been intermittently monitoring for a notification since the news came out that a record was on the way, but it still happened out of nowhere. I immediately freaked out, rushed to purchase and download the record, and hopped on a bus back to campus.

What made the night was the snow that started following as the bus reached Amherst. Being stoned presupposes you to make connections between otherwise unrelated events, but even without the weed the mid-winter snowfall would have felt like pure magic. All I wanted to do was walk around the school and enjoy the moment, watching the fragile eddies swirl around the lampposts: reveling in the notion that I was taking part, finally, in a collective listening party comprised of (supposedly) hundreds of thousands of individual strangers disconnected by everything but the guitars presently roaring in our ears.

Is m b v, My Bloody Valentine’s long-awaited follow-up to one of the most celebrated albums ever released, worthy of such retrospective adulation? It depends on who you ask, but I think the general consensus matches what AJ Ramirez wrote for popmatters; it’s simply a good record, not a great one. It pulls some new tricks out of the bag for a band reaching their third decade – specifically in its quasi-experimental third act – but the focus on post-Loveless material, and the assumed largesse in such an act, makes the record feel like a overdue victory lap rather than a thrilling new chapter. Granted, there’s perhaps no rock band more deserving of self-celebration than My Bloody Valentine, but the notion still stands: would a rose by any other name sound as sweet?

The influence of shoegaze, a genre that was epitomized by Loveless, has wormed its way into unfathomable numbers of records over the three decades since its release. It’s not just the sound, but the idea behind the record: that music need not to be understood but merely felt, that the chase for that feeling was worth the bankruptcies and the behind-the-scenes breakdowns. It singlehandedly turned the genre from a short-lived product of European idiosyncrasies to an enduring movement, one that outlasted its initial decline after the corrective emergence of Britpop. Its shadow, meanwhile, cascades down into immeasurable other genres. Post-rock, post-punk, electronica, trip-hop, lo-fi, anything with dream in the front: all of these, to some extent, nurse fuchsia-pink scars.

By 2013 the contemporary “indie” boom, which had propped up another fleet of rock artists bathed in Loveless’ sonic torrents, was already facing its decline. The record’s undulant ramparts of guitar had already been worked and reworked to death. Enter the Millennials, a new generation of music fans influenced by the looming hipster subculture and pining for the dangerous days of yore, who had discovered shoegaze’s towering pinnacle and campaigned for its supremacy. To these as well as the Gen Xers who maintained a deep appreciation for the genre, a new My Bloody Valentine record, which had been threatened by frontman Kevin Shields for far too long, had formed a musical Ark of the Covenant. To the older folk, it would be the fulfillment of the promise made decades ago; to the younger, it might prove a generation-defining classic similar to Loveless’ titanic monolith, despite the now-modern classics that non-rock artists were already dropping. In this community, hype continued to build unabated.

Hype, we know now, kills everything out the door. m b v is a record with a ton of pleasant moments, but it fails to do anything that previous releases like Loveless or Tremolo or Glider didn’t already attempt to do; never mind the countless bands that have successfully updated what those releases pioneered. It has one genuinely novel moment – the motor blade fracas of “wonder 2” – and it comes at the end of a series of songs built through extended phrases of measured chord changes. If anything, the homogeneity of m b v’s song structures makes My Bloody Valentine’s songwriting process feel even more like a schtick. Strip these songs down to their bones and an instrumental like “is this and yes” is just “she found now” or “who sees you” with the guitars replaced with keyboards, while “nothing is” is essentially a more repetitive “Glider” and “new you” is “Soon” with the slider set further toward pop.

This is perhaps denigratory against a band made legendary not for the structures of their tunes but for the moods they imbued them with. Still, what made their earlier cult classics so compelling were the aural consistencies across their runtimes. You can listen to any track off Isn’t Anything or Loveless, despite the variety contained within them, and understand innately which comes from what because of how each record is defined as a whole: in Isn’t Anything’s case, by its discordant brittleness, and by Loveless’ case, its iconically inimitable sheen.

m b v has no such focus, and as such it comes across more as a collection of songs than a complete album. That’s not entirely the band’s fault: some of the songs date way farther back than others, especially the tracks that feel borne from the Loveless sessions. Still, what was once praised for its grab-bag nature now feels disconnected in ways that minimize it under scrutiny. Upon first listening – and remember, I was very stoned – I recall imagining Shields constructing the record as a three-act play, from its 90s’ Loveless outtakes to its aspiringly-poppy middle section and finally to its experimental close. Even that assessment seems generous today, especially weighted with its uncharacteristically inconsistent quality. m b v’s defining song, “only tomorrow,” boasts a killer guitar texture but lacks the color to make it altogether interesting, while “in another way,” with its mushy staccato and senseless progression, pulls off the impossible by being a genuinely obnoxious song in My Bloody Valentine’s towering oeuvre.

I feel like I need to apologize: this is a lot of caustic circumvention to say that m b v is still, overall, a worthy listen. Despite its missteps, Kevin Shields remains a visionary that knows how to work the soundboards, and there’s still a lot to like about the record from a purely aesthetic perspective. “she found now” is not the cataclysmic opener of “Only Shallow,” but it opens the record on a serene, graceful note. “who sees you” also bears questionable similarities to Loveless’ first track, but the way its chords clash together like a raucous ocean works sublimely. Same goes for the aqueous “if i am” which, again, pairs a doubled drum track with an effective armada of chords that builds to a hypnotic finish. And “new you,” despite the “Soon” comparison, nevertheless posits My Bloody Valentine as a full-fledged pop band in a rare moment of wondrous transposition.

The funny thing about m b v is that the hyperbole (and subsequent crash) in the wake of its release really didn’t matter in the end. Shields’ refusal to release the record on streaming services until recently meant its impact would be killed out of the gate; even if it pulled off the impossible and represented a significant step-up from Loveless, it would not be the generation-defining record its fans hoped it would be. The same year, Kanye West would release Yeezus, an incensed masterpiece similarly defined by noise; Deafheaven would reshape black metal in their shoegaze-laced opus Sunbather; and before its end Beyonce’ would finally standardize the surprise release that m b v benefitted from with her incredible self-titled album. Years too late, My Bloody Valentine’s third full-length is mainly survived by memories: glowing days spent trawling the internet, magical nights covered in virgin snowfall, ephemeral moments of spiritual fulfillment fleetingly cast in a blurry indigo light.