seriously, I feel like a victim of emotional abuse.
It has only been about 12 years since Since I Left You, but I still feel like I can sympathize with My Bloody Valentine fans whose last album came out a whopping 21 years ago. As another side note, it's very strange to think that I have basically lived my entire life in between these two My Bloody Valentine Albums.
And what a time it has been! other bands have flared up and died out like distant stars, and all the while people still listened to, and loved My Bloody Valentine. What kind of band could inspire such a sustained reverence?
Well, My Bloody Valentine's album Loveless is often considered the pinnacle of shoegaze music, a subgenre typified by the heavy use of effect pedals which drown the music in oceans of fuzz and distorted noise. The effect is hypnotizing, sexual, and surprisingly relaxing. My bloody Valentine is especially talented at creating this torrential ocean of noise, and while listening to their music, it often feels as if you could just dissolve yourself in it. To top it off, Belinda Butcher's voice fits in with the wailing, distorted guitars so snugly, and smoothly there is not one gap in this infernal shower.
Now, on this new album, My Bloody Valentine tries to shoot for the same sound, but falls quite short for several reasons.
The first track, "She Found Now" is quite slow and methodical. It is mostly a wall of fuzz that starts to pick up with some barely noticeable strumming towards the end of the song. Like a lot of the songs on MBV this song does not develop or do anything interesting at all for its entire five minutes. I like some of the distorted soloing on the next track "Only Tomorrow," but it's so understated, its barely noticeable. In fact I found that the waves of fuzzy sustained guitar in this entire album were consistently dull. Rather than thick and murky like an ocean, they are light and airy like a fog, and equally as captivating.
My Bloody Valentine has always been more about the textures of the distortion than the actual song writing, which is fine, but on this album, I found that none of the textures were that finely crafted or well put together. This leaves nothing engaging in the music at all. On the tracks "Who Sees You" and "Wonder 2" for instance, I thought that the textures of the vocals did not compliment the sound of the guitars even slightly.
The album really picks up in energy towards the end. The drums are much more noticeable from "The New You" onward but even in these songs, they just don't develop enough for them to really be interesting to me. "Nothing Is" has an incredibly hypnotic repetitiveness to it, but the way it ends is just so abrupt that it makes me think they literally had no other ideas.
To me, this whole album just feels rushed. They really tried to get it out suddenly without paying enough attention to the pacing, and the blending of the various elements. It's consistently dull, and none of the songs develop or change in an interesting way. Even the cover art smacks of intense laziness! Its bland blue boxes and poorly rendered, 90's style letters represent the disinterested lack of attention with which I feel this whole album was composed. In the 21 years My Bloody Valentine has been apart, it doesn't sound like they have grown as musicians in any tangible way. They have been left behind in the 90's, as all of these songs sound like they could have been on Loveless but were cut from it because they had better material. It really is a shame, because these songs are just so close to being listenable, and if they had taken more time to prepare them, it wouldn't have ended up being the dull grey parade of distorted lethargy that it is.
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