Yin-Yang Big Bang

Toronto, 1989, club name forgotten. Onstage, My Bloody Valentine
guitarist/vocalist Bilinda Butcher’s white, sleeveless button-down
shirt is blowing upward, revealing a flat, milky-white stomach. She is
kittenishly pretty, a paragon of femininity. Yet she is also partially
responsible for the beautiful maelstrom swirling around her and her
three bandmates, guitarist/vocalist Kevin Shields, bassist Deb Googe,
and drummer Colm O’Ciosoig. It’s a massive, dynamic, annihilating sound
that makes ogling a fetching abdomen seem shamefully banal.

The rhythm section is animated, Googe lunging and O’Ciosoig
thrashing his kit like seasoned rock animals have done since at least
the ’60s. The guitarist/vocalists, however, are nearly motionless,
although they constantly wring their instruments’ tremolo arms while
they (literally) gaze at their effects pedals and occasionally peer
into the middle distance through their long fringes of hair while
gently emoting into their mics.

The material—mostly taken from their then-recent Isn’t
Anything full-length and the You Made Me Realise and Feed
Me with Your Kiss EPs—resonates with the bomblike impact of
the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy four years previous.
Before our stunned ears, MBV are remaking rock in their own image: a
newly discordant yet harmonious yin-yang big bang of impossibly
rapturous melody and scalding noise.

They close with “You Made Me Realise,” extending the cacophonous
bridge—which lasts 40 seconds on the record—for several
minutes into a sustained geyser of Glenn Branca–esque tone
explosions. People look around at their fellow punters, trying to
ascertain if what’s happening is real. Some hustle for the exits, eyes
closed, fingers in ears. Some grin dementedly, proud of their ability
to withstand the assault. Some sarcastically dance or hold up lighters.
No matter how we react, though, we all know that we’ll be recounting
this moment to friends for the rest of our lives.

Between songs, My Bloody Valentine say nothing to the enthralled
crowd. They don’t need to. Their music is more than sufficient to keep
us dazzled. The gig is worth the lack of banter as well as the
terminally dull
11-hour roundtrip drive my brother, friend and
fellow zine writer Johnny Ray Huston, and I made from Detroit—and
then some.

The next week, MBV played Detroit’s St. Andrew’s Hall and we three
finagled an interview with them, which we published in our fanzine,
You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever. MBV were shy, didn’t know
anybody in Detroit, and after we interviewed them at the club, they
just hung around with us, not really knowing what to do with themselves
(this was their first North American tour). These were the rock deities
who launched us into full-body pleasure spasms just a week before? And
now these shrinking violets were looking to a few besotted Yank fanboys
for kicks? It was an eye-opener.

It also sparked an observation: Sometimes the greatest musicians are
simply ordinary folks who aren’t inclined to quaff gallons of whiskey,
toss TVs into hotel pools, and fuck everything in sight (not that
there’s anything wrong with those things). My Bloody Valentine’s ascent
to godhead status can be viewed as a triumph of the meek, proof that
the introverted can make world-historical innovations in rock ‘n’ roll.
MBV showed that you don’t need to be some combination of alien and
monstrous asshole to shift a sonic paradigm—though having a
perfectionist streak, as band mastermind Shields does, helps.

Google the phrase “influenced by My Bloody Valentine” and witness
the seminal impact (over 59,000 results) of an unassuming Anglo-Irish
foursome whose last album, Loveless, came out in 1991.

Why all the fuss? Mainly, it’s because with his breakthroughs from
1988 to 1991, Shields bestowed a new six-string dialect to rock, one so
eloquent and enchanting that hundreds of bands—including those
from metal, ambient electronic, IDM, minimal techno, underground
hiphop—have siphoned inspiration from it. (Experimental
guitarist/composer Rafael Toral even nicked the cover concept of
Loveless with his 1995 album of Shields-inflected drones,
Wave Field.) It’s almost as if Shields found an element that’s
better than oxygen to breathe. To achieve this 30-plus years after a
genre’s emergence is a phenomenal feat.

From 1987 to 1991, MBV had one of the greatest creative runs in rock
history. It rivaled those of the Beatles’ 1965 to 1969, the Velvet
Underground’s 1967 to 1970, Can’s 1969 to 1974, and Hüsker
Dü’s 1984 to 1987. Shields’s hot streak was such that even
relatively overlooked EP cuts such as “Swallow,” “Honey Power,” and
“Glider” radiated unparalleled brilliance.

MBV’s 1987 output—the EPs Sunny Sundae Smile and
Strawberry Wine and the mini-album Ecstasy—finds
them melding Ramones’ speedy energy, Love’s luxurious guitar jangle,
and the Jesus and Mary Chain’s feedback symphonies. The sound followed
the UK music scene’s
post-Psychocandy/C86 obsession
with amphetamined tempos, buoyant melodies, and sugary vocal harmonies.
MBV’s releases during this time are among the finest of their kind,
proving them to be competent formalists, but only faintly hint at the
seismic changes in their aesthetic to come.

When Isn’t Anything dropped in March 1988, it instantly felt
like a ground-zero moment. After its release, I couldn’t listen to any
other album for a month straight, except for Pixies’ Surfer
Rosa. Everything else seemed puny and anemic by comparison,
hopelessly mired in a musty past, a scrap heap of abacuses next to a
supercomputer. That feeling gradually faded, but Isn’t Anything still sounds astounding in 2009, an iconic work—and yet it’s not
even MBV’s peak.

On Isn’t Anything, MBV compose beautiful melodies, tumultuous
rhythms, and spectral atmospheres that reflect a perfect amalgam of
male and female impulses, festooned in bizarrely distorted guitars
that, as mentioned, introduced a fascinating new lingua franca to
rock’s Babel of Tongues. Album opener “Soft as Snow (but Warm Inside)”
showcases O’Ciosoig’s cardiac-
infarction rhythmic finesse and a
corkscrewing bass line from Googe, while Shields and Butcher strangle
tortured sighs from their axes as they wax seductive to each other
(they were lovers at the time). “Lose My Breath,” “No More Sorry,” and
“I Can See It (but I Can’t Feel It)” add fresh coats of tonal paint to
the ballad form. For the punks, “Feed Me with Your Kiss,” “Sueisfine,”
and “You Never Should” push those loud-fast-rules buttons, but with
more roller-coaster contortions and foxier frequencies than your
typical Mohawked mooks do. “Nothing Much to Lose” possesses MBV’s
sexiest melody and its quiet verses/rousing choruses template has
rarely been bettered. Finally, “All I Need” is unprecedented, a gaseous
threnody in an exploding gong factory.

How to follow up one of the greatest rock LPs ever? How about by
creating Loveless, the greatest rock LP in history according to
many serious heads, including former Stranger freelancer Mike
McGonigal, who argued to that effect for a book issued in Continuum’s
33 1/3 series. (The tome details Loveless‘s long, painful,
expensive birth, but it didn’t “nearly bankrupt” Creation Records,
despite scuttlebutt to the contrary.)

From the first seconds of opener “Only Shallow,” the listener feels
as if she’s thrust into a thrilling new future where guitars sound like
vacuum cleaners the size of spaceships and voices disperse into a
sensual mist of phonemes. In fact, Shields and Butcher revolutionized
the “oo” phoneme on Loveless, where it’s a recurrent signifier
for longing and gratification. Their voices conjoin like an

alternate-universe Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazlewood, solarized and
smeared into an androgynous woosh of desire, frustration, and
ecstasy, vividly capturing the contradictory feelings that arise in
intense relationships.

Shields explained his innovative guitar technique to McGonigal: “I
found that if there was only one guitar track whilst the vocals were
going, split between different amps and mics, the sound was bigger,
especially when you use open strings and tunings and the tremolo arm on
[Fender] Jazzmasters or Jaguars… It’s hard to explain the guitar
bending. What you hear is what is between the sound.” Shields
also uses what he calls “reverse reverb”—heard on the stunning
“To Here Knows When” and “Blown a Wish”—which fosters that
“ultra-melted guitar sound.”

More convincingly than any rock band (even Sonic Youth), MBV use
unconventional methods to foreground indistinctiveness and make
disorienting hazy dream/drug states seem natural and alluring.
Loveless‘s rock is swaddled in multiple layers of gauze and is
seemingly zonked to the gills on codeine; by all rights, the music here
should leave you numb. Instead, it elucidates extreme emotions until
you swoon at the oversaturated aural plenitude MBV generate. On
Loveless, MBV assimilate and reconstitute elements from the
Jesus and Mary Chain, Cocteau Twins, and Dinosaur Jr. into a unique
mélange of force and finesse, energy and entropy.

One of rock’s most gripping sagas has been the agonizing wait for
the follow-up to Loveless. After signing to Island, MBV scrapped
two attempts at it; covers of Louis Armstrong and Wire songs are the
only MBV efforts to see daylight since they left Creation Records.
Meanwhile, band members have gone on to do some good work elsewhere, if
nothing as momentous as their MBV music. O’Ciosoig has worked with
Mazzy Star vocalist Hope Sandoval, Googe has played in Snowpony with
Moonshake’s Katharine Gifford, Butcher’s musical activities have been
very infrequent.

Unsurprisingly, Shields has been busiest, joining Primal Scream as
guitarist from 1998 to 2005, recording four tracks for Sofia Coppola’s
2003 film Lost in Translation, and accompanying Patti Smith on
guitar for The Coral Sea, her spoken-word tribute to the late
artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Of Shields’s many remixes, those he did for
Primal Scream (“MBV Arkestra [If They Move, Kill ‘Em]”) and Mogwai
(“Fear Satan”) stand as his most extraordinary post-Loveless works. Ultimately, though, they’re exasperating glimpses at what
Loveless‘s successor could’ve been.

MBV’s reunion shows have been earning mostly positive reviews, with
“mind-blowing” a recurrent adjective among friends of mine who’ve
witnessed them—even though no new material has surfaced. On

April 27 at WaMu Theater, Seattle will finally find out if My
Bloody Valentine can reclaim
the alchemical blitzkrieg bliss that
made their live performances so galvanizing. Let’s hope they can still
take it to the infamous bridge of “You Made Me Realise.”