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My Bloody Valentine’s new album
“M B V”

March 6 2013
8:51 PM

It’s no hyperbole: My Bloody Valentine’s comeback record “m b v” is surely one of the most awaited albums in recorded music history. For the past 22 years that separate this album from its predecessor, “Loveless” (itself universally recognized as an extremely  influential offspring of British independent music), the band’s composer Kevin Shields has issued an unnerving series of statements suggesting the release of such an album. Championing the genre known as “shoegazing”, My Bloody Valentine have pioneered, with Loveless, a compositional technique based on pre-recorded guitar parts, strongly manipulated on tape with various effects as to transform them as pure sound generators integrated in songwriting reminiscent of childlike carousels and ingénue love songs. The harsh divide between the music’s droning wall of sound and the dreamy features of the songline established a benchmark for what would later be called “post-rock”. M B V has moments of intense beauty, incorporating some of the elements loved by the indie public in their previous records: distortion, crepuscular melodies, and a vague sense of being lost that resound magnificently with late-adolescent experience. The only difference, which is the most important one, is that this record came out after the scenery has dramatically changed – after the wax and wane of music streaming, for one. The bitterness of certain on-line commentary, paired with audience’s messianic appraisal, seems to highlight not the changes in their music, but rather how much the world has changed since Loveless. (Francesco Tenaglia)