Album review: My Bloody Valentine - MBV

By COLIN SOMERVILLE
Published on 10/02/2013 00:00

Not many bands can take 22 years between albums and find their audience still waiting patiently, drooling with expectation.

My Bloody Valentine

MBV

Buy at www.mybloodyvalentine.org only

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The style of delivery was casually modern – rumours of an imminent release swirled around the internet, as spectral as the nine new songs themselves.

Kevin Shields’ appetite for distorting sounds remains undiminished, but do My Bloody Valentine still conjure up that essence of indispensability to modern music that the band defined in the last century?

Only tomorrow lurches through a haze of phasing and thrashed electric guitar and goofy shoe-gazing vocals. It weaves a woozy spell like some futuristic folk music. Is this and yes features the modestly pure vocals of Bilinda Butcher, sounding like Elizabeth Fraser on valium, swimming with dolphins wearing divers’ boots.

Squelchy bass and a bouncy beat make new you the perfect sci-fi Eurovision contender, while nothing is represents the most brutal of electro frugging. It is the guitar riff reinvented and the bastard son of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. Not for the casual user, it takes no prisoners. Finally, wonder 2 jumps aboard an express train careering into the next dimension. In the context of the modern music industry, this is an extraordinary record. No new ground is broken, but the rock is seriously turned over.

Download this: new you, wonder 2