124. MY BLOODY VALENTINE- ISN’T ANYTHING (1988)

First things first, Isn’t Anything > Loveless.  I’ve written regularly in these pages about the music of 1988, and twice during the course that year, in Glasgow and Manchester, I was fortunate enough to witness the new improved My Bloody Valentine in action. The title of their second (mini) album Ecstasy (released late ’87) had promised euphoria but hadn’t really delivered. Still, the record was a marked improvement over those early shambling – if faintly charming – singles and EPs for which the critics as well as the record-buying public had little time. By summer of ’88 however their ‘You Made Me Realise’ EP had completely transformed indie guitar music in the UK. If there remained subtle traces of the familiar janglepop, those pretty melodies were now buttressed by dissonant metallic chunks culled from the Transatlantic sounds of Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. But songs such as the ravishing ‘Slow’ confirmed the extent of their reinvention, owing as little to C86 as to US Hardcore, and sounded as if they had discovered sex and noise on the same day, fully immersing themselves in both without the slightest inhibition. This was an altogether more enthralling proposition, so much so that, surveying the audiences at those gigs, one envisaged every boy suddenly reimagining himself as Kevin Shields, stealing the odd glance at those guitar pedal boards whenever his gaze could avert itself for one moment from Bilinda Butcher.

Holed up in the studio surviving on little more than two hours sleep per night, the conditions were less than ideal for making music, and the album sleeve with its bleached out faces mirrored the opaque out-of-focus blissfulness contained within. MBV would prove themselves to be master manipulators of sound gliding their guitars through accelerating/decelerating warped arcs of noise, procuring shivering little eargasms all over the place. The hard graft on the album’s opening track ‘Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)’ was undertaken by Debbie Googe’s bass which maps out a melody over a grating twisting dragging guitar riff, which can’t be bothered to get going at all, with the beat equally laborious, as if Colm was nodding out or the drum machine had broken down.

That almost post-coital languor and imprecision characterises much of the album – be it the hushed crescendos of ‘Lose My Breath’ or the whirring cloudbusting atmospherics of ‘No More Sorry’, while on ‘Cupid Come’ the verses collapse on top of one another, almost as if Colm had accidentally overextended the beat by a few lengths, forcing the others to slow down to accommodate his error. It’s not all hazy and nebulous atmospherics of course, with ‘(When You Awake) You’re Still In A Dream’ and ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’ proving that Shields, despite the blurry weightlessness elsewhere, still had a penchant for some good old-fashioned rifferama.

At its pinnacle, on ‘All I Need’ (there is nothing quite so ‘out there’ on Loveless I assure you) we find MBV rewriting the rule book completely to create one of the most authentically psychedelic things I’ve ever heard. Here our intrepid sonic explorers climb aboard some pulsing spacecraft attempting to negotiate its way through the eye of a terrifying cosmic intergalactic battle – comets flying in every direction – with the machine’s engine slowly burning up. Or at least that’s what I’m hearing.

On Side Two the tempo and energy is relentless. ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’ was the follow up to ‘You Made Me Realise’ released just prior to the album itself – this one’s all about the rhythm section. If at times on the album Colm’s drumming is narcoleptic almost arrhythmic, here he could be Keith Moon on a strict diet of super strength amphetamine while Googe’s skullcrushing pummeling bass riff drives the whole thing. You shall submit. ‘Sueisfine’ (is that really what we’re hearing?) meanwhile could be Husker Du blasting out ‘Blue Jay Way’ inside a hornet’s nest. But almost everywhere else, buried beneath those layers of distortion are melodies to die for. ‘Nothing Much To Lose’ (almost conventional by the rest of the album’s standards) is torn to shreds by a monster riff and a blizzard of feedback, while the dark droning  beauty of ‘I Can See It (But I Can’t Feel It)’ leaves us aching and aching for more.

At the very least the sonic leap forward from Ecstasy to Isn’t Anything is a far greater one than that from Isn’t Anything to Loveless. Loveless gets all the plaudits, perhaps rightly so – it took three years to refine the rawness of the experiments on Isn’t Anything, and is in some ways the latter album is even more pinkly delicious, but by then we fully expected it to be so, and I actually recall it coming as something of a minor disappointment at the time. By contrast not a soul would have been disappointed by Isn’t Anything, bursting as it with ideas and energy and awash with sheer beautiful ecstatic noise.  (JJ)