‘The new album is available to buy now,’ is all that went up about 10 days ago, on My Bloody Valentine’s website that looks like a cheap generic blog page – so anyone might be forgiven looking a little incredulous, given that My Bloody Valentine’s last album was released 22 years ago. And for anyone, like myself, who counts the mighty Loveless as a milestone in music history and a strong contender for the top spot of personal most important album ever, and who by around 1997 had given up on mastermind Kevin Shields ever releasing anything again, the idea of a new record seemed, well, too good to be true – or by now almost too scary to be true.
mbv, in the meantime, just simply grows. I’ve always wondered at how Loveless aged so well in sound, or rather didn’t seem to age at all – which is why mbv picking up at exactly the place where Loveless left off 22 years ago, if maybe with a little more late afternoon laziness, feels instantly natural. By the time you get used to things being exactly where you had imagined them to be (and if only for lack of being able to imagine where else My Bloody Valentine could possibly go from here), things turn unexpectedly cute, with New You being as close to a pop ditty as MBV will ever come, presumably. And just when you feel lulled into security thinking that time has softened them up after all, mbv takes another and entirely unexpected turn plunging into such a ferocious and brutal trinity of sonic violence, that in the end, all that is left to do is to hit ‘replay’.
If anything, mbv is a baffling album – one can’t even call it a comeback, since it feels like they were never really gone; I suppose from Loveless it was clear that My Bloody Valentine lived in their own world and time, and that was just how it was going to be from here on. I, for one, am happy to get another glimpse into it, and am looking forward to the next few weeks wallowing in mbv.
