Hey, it's been over a year since I last posted! Good to be back 'n' babblin'.
Just got the remastered double disc reissue of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. I don't think I've ever mentioned it here, but this one is in my Top 10 fave albums of all time, so this was pretty exciting to me.
So I've only listened to the version mastered from the analog tape, which by all accounts is the better of the two (the other is the original digital master). There has been some discussion about a glitch in the song "What You Want," but I found it incredibly smaller than I expected. Folks are saying that Kevin Shields (a storied perfectionist) should have noted this and corrected it before being released. In my own perverse way I think it's kinda cool and wonder if maybe Kevin left it in intentionally. After all, it might fit the aesthetic (More below.).
So it does sound pretty amazing. There's a whole new clarity and crispness on the high end, making subtleties audible for the first time, and there's an increase in the stereo separation. You can really hear the acoustic guitars on "Loomer" and "Sometimes," and the little keyboard melody that begins "To Here Knows When," just to mention a couple of those aforementioned subtleties.
And how about that aesthetic? Great pop melodies of which one can't make out most of the lyrics, the songs apparently hidden behind walls of distorted sound. This is the immediate impression, but I find more. In the early '90s a piece in the magazine Artforum appeared, which seemed to me to be somewhat insightful. (Sorry, I can't find it online.) The main thing I took from it was when the writer described their sound as "imploding crescendos." Implosion is key.
For me this music is largely about the promise of transcendence that rock & roll makes, at the same time proving that impossible. When one feels promised the explosion of catharsis, this experience implodes instead, which I find significantly meaningful, and even enjoyable in a way that may be taken as nihilistic or not. One takes a journey, only to realize one is nowhere at all. Postmodern? Definitely. Ironic? Not sure, but I don't think so.
There's a kind of sincerity about this music, without sporting some personal kind of soul-baring. Despite its yes/no quality, I don't think it's meant to even refer to some other music. The approach is pretty straightforward. That said, of course it's VERY confrontational, even in its strange beauty.
And for me the backwards/forwards guitar loop between "To Here Knows When" and "When You Sleep" says something profound about rock & roll that I can't possibly verbalize.
Wow, babblin' is right. Never thought I'd write that much! Maybe it's the beginning of a trend--one can only hope.
