My Bloody Valentine - m b v

Everyone wrote reviews of this album over the last two weeks (it is two weeks old tonight) and I still have not purchased it.  It costs $16.  I have been listening to it on streaming players.  As such I do not have it with me anywhere outside, in my iPod, playing on my headphones; I can only listen in my apartment, and with the AUX cable connecting my laptop to my stereo.  Listening to this album from tinny laptop speakers would be sacrilege.  When I have the discretionary income, I'll get it for the headphones.  

There was a 22 year wait for this album.  I joked on facebook two weeks ago that a betting pool should open up on whether m b v would really be released that evening or not.  I forgot about it and then listened to the first half of the album the next day and went to a Super Bowl party.  I watched Beyonce perform her halftime show and I asked my friend hosting if he liked My Bloody Valentine (I know he likes much newer indie rock, but he is not generally known for liking all of the Our Band Could be Your Life bands, except for Sonic Youth perhaps, which is certainly in the direction of My Bloody Valentine...).  He did not know about m b v, nor was he interested in how it might sound.

Oeuvre rule: I love My Bloody Valentine.  See Concert Review  (which still has one of the best pictures of a band I have ever taken, I think, because it looks like the cover of Loveless) and 50th Post Milestone in Anticipation of Concert.  I have heard almost all of their music.

And this is one of the many things that sets MBV apart from other bands: you start with Loveless, you don't get it necessarily, but it's good--then you move onto Isn't Anything and reflect that it may be even better than Loveless, but don't exactly make this generally known because it might cause other people to think you don't "get" Loveless--you hear all of the old stuff (maybe not the stuff from Geek! or This is Your Bloody Valentine--getting into that 1985 stuff separates the hardcore fans from the obsessive fans)--and you are content to listen to Loveless or choice tracks from other releases from now until the end of time, and you expect Kevin Shields to keep teasing everyone that he is going to put out another MBV album soon and take everything he says with a grain of salt.

Until two weeks ago.

The closest analogue to this situation is the excitement that surrounded the release of Chinese Democracy.  That album took 15 years to release.

This album took 22 years to release.

This album is much better than Chinese Democracy.

We don't know exactly what Axel Rose and Kevin Shields were up to during that period, but we know some details.  Shields worked with J. Mascis (he played guitar as a member of "the Fog" on a few songs during the time that Dinosaur Jr.--a band highly responsible for the development of the MBV sound--was broken up).  Shields worked with Primal Scream, apparently (I haven't listened to them enough to offer an opinion on it).  And then there was Lost in Translation.

I saw Lost in Translation in December of 2003--but before I came back to the States for that, I heard the song "City Girl" in Paris.  Another classmate and friend of mine recognized the extraordinary character of that song and he downloaded and we listened to it over and over and talked about how great it was and we wondered why something that seemed so effortless wasn't matched by anyone currently working.

A lot has changed since 2003.  Dinosaur Jr. is back together (and have been very prolific and successful).  Chinese Democracy was released.  iPods and iTunes became de rigeur, and Compact Discs flirt with obsolescence.  The Nirvana legend continues to generate income for Courtney Love.  The Rolling Stones put out a new album.  Weezer all but lost their former greatness.  The White Stripes and the Strokes "saved" rock and roll; The Arcade Fire brought "majestic rock" to the masses and won Grammy Awards.  The Yeah Yeah Yeahs became respected elder statesmen(persons?).  R&B and Hip Hop came back in a bigger way than the "Outkast album" from that year could ever anticipate.  Elliott Smith committed suicide (around the same time as "City Girl").  Lollapalooza and other music festivals (i.e Pitchfork) became cash cows.

People would shell out hundreds of dollars for festivals, now.  Coachella could offer Morrissey $45 million (and purely vegan food vendors) to reunite the Smiths on their stage, and he would reject them, and he now flirts with retirement.  David Bowie went away and is about to come back.  Michael Jackson was about to come back, and he died in the process.  Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore broke up, and Sonic Youth's 32 year legacy remains a question mark.  And then My Bloody Valentine came back in 2007.  And then Pavement played reunion shows.

Rewind back to October of 2000, my senior year in high school, and my [ex-]friend Jon giving me Loveless, telling me not to listen to so much Smashing Pumpkins because Billy Corgan was really just ripping off this album.  Listen to Jon speak at length about Siamese Dream--"it is exactly the same guitar sound!"  Listen to all of the other bands Jon endorses--Minor Threat, Fugazi, Sunny Day Real Estate, Slint, the Velvet Underground, Cap'n Jazz--go to college, find other people that like the same bands and become obsessed along with them.

And then go to see My Bloody Valentine play alone because you don't have any friends in the city you're in--or at least any friends that want to shell out $50.

And then have m b v come out when you are in the waning days of your 20's.

Every review of m b v must have this personal element.  To talk about the album itself seems like an afterthought.  The first track sounds kind of boring.  The second track reminds the listener that they are listening to MBV and that it is about to get awesome.  The third track, "Who Sees You," is probably my favorite song on the album.  It stands along with the best songs they have ever done.  I personally find "Is This and Yes" to be one of the weakest songs on the album.  "New You" and "In Another Way" blend into each other for me.  One of them is super awesome and the other one is only really awesome.  "Nothing Is" is often compared to "You Made Me Realise" and indeed is the most fun song to turn up really loud on the stereo and play guitar to, while "Wonder 2" is often considered a standout track, though I am usually worrying about what album to put on next by that point (or getting ready to go to bed).

You won't be reading this far unless you are already an MBV fanatic.  You won't care about this album unless you are, and you probably won't be converted to MBV with the release of this album.  That is one of the things about this band.  It's unlikely they will play the Super Bowl next year.  They're not a band for the masses, but they are one of the most popular "underground" bands in history.

With m b v their legend is complete.  Nothing more need be said at this time.

 

Atlas Sound - Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel

Released in February of 2008, Atlas Sound's debut album Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel one-ups the success of lead singer Bradford Cox's other band Deerhunter, a band who racked up accolades and enjoyed increasing popularity in 2007 with Cryptograms, the Flourescent Grey EP, and numerous festival appearances. Cox had been talking up his side project for a while, and so I looked forward to this coming out. Somehow I knew it would be worth hearing when I read an interview with Cox and he started going off about how terrible the majority of bands are in the music scene. There are few greater consolations to the pain this life offers than seeing a person like Cox dimiss the mediocrity surrounding him. It is life-affirming to see someone so unapologetically pissed off about the due being given certain undeserving others.

"A Ghost Story" is easily the creepiest song on the album, very powerful aesthetically, gets you into the mood of the album. If anyone thinks this song is cute or making too big of a deal about itself, I urge you to listen to it in the dark, with no lights on at night, and see if you don't start feeling like freaking out because a ghost is going to emerge from your closet.

"Recent Bedroom" opens up the "proper" album, as the first track acts as more of a "found object" sound collage. Immediately, you notice that Cox is going to sing very differently on Atlas Sound than on Deerhunter. Gone is the rapid, throaty, yelping and here is the grandiose, impossibly slow, highest-pitched, most angelic, comforting style to match any other current performer including Thom Yorke. The lyrics are very simple, I could practically write all the lyrics for the album in a paragraph (except for "River Card"): I walked outside/I could not cry/I don't know why. It's apparently about seeing a dying relative and not knowing how it makes you feel that it's not making you cry. Maybe it's a more complex sentiment than that but I like the ambiguity of emotion.

"River Card" is apparently based on a short story about falling in love with one's own reflection in a river. Cox intones how badly in love he is with this person that is actually only a reflected image, but he realizes that if he tried to throw himself into said cherished object he would only be drowned. It's a powerful statement.

"Quarantined" is apparently about how Cox spent weeks/months in a hospital having various surgeries performed on him and how alone he felt being away from everyone he knew. This is the first really weird song on the album, and you will know what I mean when you hear Cox sing, "Quarantined" for the first time: "Quar-an-tined/and kept/so far away/from my friends" but as weird as the pronunciation is, by its end the song has stretched into the kind of lilting sound aesthetic that Cox has carried throughout the entire album. He talked about how obsessed he was with the My Bloody Valentine album Loveless and how he would listen to it over and over, trying to understand how that band had pulled such ethereal sounds from their instruments and effects gadgets. Now, that album very famously was very expensive to make (most expensive indie rock album of all time, maybe?) topping out over a million dollars. It appears that Cox has made most of these recordings under rather bare circumstances, making his accomplishment all the more impressive.

The sound that enters in "Quarantined," a sort of melodic humming in the highest registers of pitch with an atmospheric glow, reappears in "On Guard," which is a song you can listen to and not even realize you are listening to it, like a bunch of songs on Cryptograms that are instrumental. Actually, it is easier to listen to "Winter Vacation" and think you are still listening to "On Guard," so similar as they sound to each other and so seamlessly do they blend together into one. However, "Cold as Ice" asserts itself in the mix next. This song is apparently (and this whole album, in a way is) about unrequited love, how you can be so close to one person and so in love with everything they do and how they can act as if everything's totally normal and you're just their friend and not someone who wants to be their lover...However such songs never reveal their meaning so clearly. The lyrics are left minimal and vague, which only serves to elevate them in the mind of the listener.

"Scraping Past" is the second weirdly-pronounced song after "Quarantined" and its ending does not enter into the soaring heights of that other black sheep of a song. Instead, it offers the most catharsis of any song on the album, Cox weirdly pronouncing "Scraping past" over and over, paying particular attention to the sound of every letter as it pertains to each word. "Small Horror" introduces the re-surfacing of the sound echo that carries the album, and is a rather minimalistic song, but serves as an appropriate taking off point for the final stunning 1/3 of the album.

"Ready, Set, Glow," an instrumental, minimalist, serves its purpose well. "Bite Marks" opens up with a sound that comes straight out of Loveless, I swear, and may be the closest thing to a misstep on the album It is not a bad song, but the meaning is difficult to decipher, and its bassline makes it sound as if it almost wants to be a pop song, but then it sounds so sad. I don't skip it anyways because I'm very concerned about upsetting the flow of the album. "After Class" is another instrumental that is probably slightly more interesting than "Ready, Set, Glow" but serves an even greater purpose.

"Ativan" is the last "song" on the album (the title track, another instrumental, closes it out) and, as I told a friend at the show we saw after they played it, the best song on the album. It is perhaps worth noting that the first time I listened to this album, I laid down to go to bed around "Small Horror" and I could not help but think about how amazing the album was as I tried to sleep, how remarkably good the songs were, how I could already tell it was a classic, timeless statement of a record, and how the ending was one of the best endings I had heard of an album in a long, long time. Now, after listening to "Ativan" dozens of times, it is not as special to me as it once was. But the first time I heard it I could not believe it was so good.

Apparently it is a song about anti-depressant drugs that Cox had been taking recently which have an addictive quality (I believe). The song is about sleeping until you throw up, or feel drunk, sleeping while the intended target of the song goes out to have "lunch with a girl who has hair as soft as baby's breath...lunch with a girl that takes time to listen to every word you utter," quite probably the most achingly sung lines on the album, and potentially the most heartbreaking. Regardless, LTBLTWCSBCF ends with the title-track instrumental, content with whimpering out the remainder of its energy on some far away sounding distorted guitar sounds.

I may have been exagerrating when I said that Random Spirit Lover might have been better than OK Computer, and people thought I was crazy when I said that, so I will not say that Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel is better than Loveless, but I will say that it tries damn hard to be. Unless some truly amazing work is released this year, Atlas Sound's debut deserves to be near the top of the year end best of 2008 lists. Unfortunately, I would imagine that most will not remember it by then. Indeed, it seems most don't even remember it now, even though it only came out a couple of months ago.

I went nuts when it came out and listened to it many times in a row and I went to see their show at the Echo in L.A. and they played most of the songs from the album and the only one that was different was "Ativan," which had been turned into a loud shoegaze song. If I hadn't been so afraid of coming off the wrong way, I could have interviewed Bradford Cox that night (I saw him outside, but he was already talking voluminously to someone so I didn't interrupt) and pulled together much more personal insight into this album review. But I believe I have done a good enough job.