REVIEW: MY BLOODY VALENTINE - m b v

My Bloody Valentine - m b v
self-released, 2013

I'm not dead--I've just been busy, then sick, then busy once again. I will finish my countdown of favourite albums from 2012 soon (when I discover how to add hours to the day, of course), but I figured a special event called for a special post.

Last night, My Bloody Valentine released the followup to 1991's Loveless, simply titled m b v. I'm not going to rehash the backstory here. More able commentators than I will do so, and they will have had the benefit of being there. I first heard Loveless in 2002, when I was in high school. I'd heard of it for several years before that, but for some reason had never investigated My Bloody Valentine. One day, I went to the music store and bought Loveless. I'd never listened to single track before buying it. I put it on and it didn't do anything that I expected. It was . . . amazing? I'm not sure I can really remember anymore what I first thought. I grew to love it, though, like so many others. I can remember sitting on the bus with a friend, coming home from school and listening to the end of "I Only Said" over and over again, trying to figure out how you make a guitar sound like that. I can remember sitting in my basement, trying to make my guitar do those things. I can remember the first flushes of young love and young heartbreak and how "Come in Alone" was perfect for both of them. I can remember deciding that the guitar break in "Loomer" was what the voice of a god would sound like. I can remember my parents' patience in putting up with me playing Loveless in the car endlessly (sorry, mom and dad!). I have a surprisingly large number of memories that are attached to listening to Loveless.

I'm on my eighth listen to m b v (plus more for a few individual songs) at this point. I've got a handle on what I'm thinking about the songs (I think), so I figured I'd put down some initial thoughts. These will change, and come December, when I make my next albums of the year list, I'm sure I'll look back on what I wrote and laugh at how I tried to process this album the day after it appeared in the world. I'll find it strange that the songs that will become my favourites are the ones that I was less sold on initially (as if it could be any other way). I'll laugh at things I didn't know that have since come to light and shaped my understanding of the album. It's inevitable. Oh, well. Here goes nothing.

m b v is an album of two parts. There's a very clear break at some point between "the followup to Loveless" and "a new group of songs by My Bloody Valentine" that, I think, will become this album's identity. In some ways, m b v is impossible to listen to non-ideologically. It is, in Zizek's famous phrase, "pure ideology." There is the symbolic fiction of the tortured genius, slaving away to top his own masterpiece, cracking under the pressure, and redeeming himself by finally releasing something, anything, and finding that he still has a voice after all. There is the fantasmatic spectre of the twenty two year wait--the reality that the world (and music) have moved on, that no release can mean the same thing that an album did in 1991, that whole futures that Loveless' successor could've belonged to (most tantalisingly, jungle) have been and gone--and the even more traumatic spectres of all the music that's come since Loveless: the remixes, the contributions to other bands (hello, Primal Scream!), the one offs and live performances. There's the pre-ideological kernel, the assumption that bands have next albums, that requires the symbolic fiction be set in motion to disavow those traumatic spectres (Kevin Shields himself has done a very good job of separating My Bloody Valentine from those spectres and insisting most fervently on the symbolic fiction, as in his interview with The Quietus last year). My god, you think when you press play, pure ideology. This is what it sounds like.* 

There's also the spectre of that other thing, hauntology. You want to talk about futures that have never been? The first three tracks on m b v are a pretty convincing example of what that never recorded sequel to Loveless from 1994 would've sounded like. That jungle/drum'n'bass direction that consumed 1994-1997 and never amounted to anything? "wonder 2" is an, ahem, wonderful look into that lost world. A My Bloody Valentine who decided to take a look at what Tortoise and Stereolab were cooking up and realised that "No More Sorry" and "Touched" got them halfway there? "is this and yes" is as dreamy and as beautiful, but more alien. This is, then, an album out of time. An album missing its time. An album that could never belong to a time. It's belated in the Eliotic sense of the term, a Rip Van Winkle of an album that grew more famous for being asleep (and thus lost its voice--became incapable of saying anything, of being heard as anything, of being, plain and simple, in the world--because it got cut out of the symbolic order) and woke to a world where Loveless had become Loveless, instead of simply being an album that came before this one, and Kevin Shields couldn't touch a guitar without having already reinvented it and rendered it pointless.

So, in all of that, where's the music? Perhaps more importantly, what's the music? That's not an easy answer. It's beautiful, that's for sure, but it's strange, and wrong, and boring, and a half dozen other adjectives to boot. The album starts off on its weakest foot--"she found now" is a pretty timid way of saying "We're back!," all muted vocals and subdued, subterranean howls of guitar, a far less interesting "Sometimes"--but it gains confidence quickly. "only tomorrow" and "who sees you" (the latter bearing a distinct resemblance at times to my beloved "Come in Alone") are a reminder that My Bloody Valentine is a guitar pop band, but these songs are too strange to be "When You Sleep" or "Blown a Wish" or "What You Want." Both ride long guitar outros, with "only tomorrow" turning into a fanfare of guitars-as-horns, sunny as a High Llamas tune,  and "who sees you" stealing that "Only Shallow" drum trick before tumbling into hook after unexpected hook, the chord changes always a surprise (even if it does kind of sound like Chewbacca's blues in places...). Both songs are a little too long, but why wouldn't you want to luxuriate in something like this? My Bloody Valentine's music has always been about sleep and dreams, and they seem to be soundtracking the weekend sleep-in with these two tracks. If nothing else, that Shields wasn't producing bands throughout his years in the desert is a crime that he must be held accountable for. So many bad guitar tones that never had to be: m b v's guitars are a thing of rare beauty.

The few seconds of silence between "who sees you" and "is this and yes" herald a change. A twinkling, weightless ballad, this could never have come before, even as it is so clearly coming from those earlier albums. When you wake, you're still in a dream, the band said once before, but they've never really sounded as much like a dream as it fades away as they do right here. Bilinda Butcher's voice might not even be real. It feels more like the stuff around it (guitars? synths? hours and hours of sampled and manipulated feedback?) than the expression of a human being. Suddenly, m b v's stakes are much higher. They could, you start to feel, be on to something here. "if i am" might be the last gasp of old My Bloody Valentine on the album, but even here it feels disoriented, falling apart and fading away, the moans and gasps of guitar in the background forlornly seeing their own end, mourning all the songs that never came to be. Something else is around the corner, the album seems to be saying, something that keeps interrupting the old ways.

As a first step into the new, "new you" is aptly titled, and given its live debut ahead of the album, one has to think that the band sees it as a marker of some kind. Certainly the prominent synths are a bit of a shock, but the fuzzy, funky bass and the drums feel like siblings to "Soft as Snow (But Warm Inside)," and it ends up feeling as much of a false step as "she found now." It's pretty, but like "What You Want" on Loveless, I can only imagine waiting through it to get to what's to come. In this case, it's m b v's strongest, weirdest third. "in another way" is easily the album highlight, the first song that, on my initial run through of the album, made my eyes go funny and my brain say "what the hell was that?!" Vicious sheets of guitar, frantic drumming, a beguilingly ambiguous vocal from Bilinda, everything's here, but it's the break that first appears 1:25 into the song that makes you sit up and take notice. Those pulsating guitars that suddenly seem everywhere and take you away are breathtaking. That the second half of the track consists of nothing but suggests that Shields knew exactly what he was doing when he decided there was something to these songs, after all. The bizarrely dance-y "nothing is" follows, three and a half minutes of steadily ascending guitar grind and repetitive, train-a-coming drums that ratchets the tension ever higher until cutting out into echoes of itself as heard from the next building over. 

As an end to m b v (to My Bloody Valentine, even, should it prove to be), "wonder 2" is fittingly apocalyptic. Jungle rhythms, air raid siren guitar, barely barely-there vocals, a future rush like it's 1995 all over again, the songs feels constantly on the verge of blowing away and imploding simultaneously. Whenever it feels like there's nowhere left to go other than destruction, the vocals return, and the song gets a chance to do it all over again. Then it's gone, replaced by silence. No fade out, just a quick, flanged swirl before the end. As if nothing follows this, or could follow this. "Soon" felt like an arrow pointing to all the things that My Bloody Valentine could be (and would be) just over the horizon. There's no horizon here. If Kevin Shields, if My Bloody Valentine, is to do anything else, it won't be the followup to m b v in anything other than a chronological sense. This is an album that will have no children. I have to think, to buy into that symbolic fiction, that somewhere (between South Korea and Japan, I'd imagine), Kevin Shields is happy about that.

When m b v dropped--and after the website broke, and then went back up, and then broke again, etc., etc.--I wasn't so much wondering about whether it would live up to Loveless. I wanted to know how I'd live with it. Waiting for a website to come online, bitching on twitter about that website crashing, rapturously tweeting when I finally started listening, these are all signs of how different my life is a decade on from hearing Loveless (which I listened to in my bedroom in my parents' house on a stereo, not on a laptop in my own apartment). In a lot of ways, I'm relieved just to have another My Bloody Valentine to live with until the next one (if there is one) comes out (if it ever does). There are thousands of arguments to be made about the death of one thing, or the start of another, or the end of something, or the beginning of something else with this album. I've made a half dozen in the above review. More than anything, though, what I want to do is listen to this album and, more importantly, forget this album. To forget how a song goes when I haven't listened to it in awhile. To be surprised (again) when there's a chord change or by a particularly noteworthy sound. I want to listen to this album in a thousand different ways, and I don't want to think about it as an event, as part of a failed website launch, as a blogpost, a think piece, or a Pitchfork score. I want m b v to be an album. I want to have space for m b v to mean something to me, so when the next one comes around (surely Kevin can't take another twenty two years, right?) I'll think about m b v and I'll smile at the music, sure, but at so many other things, too. For right now, writing about it ends here for me. I'm going to go do some dishes and have it on the background. Or stare out the window at the snow that's falling. It doesn't matter. I'm going to go listen. You should, too. It's a pretty great album.

*I recognise I'm taking a hell of a lot of liberties with Zizek and his discussion of ideology here. Permit me my fun.

REVIEW: ULTRAISTA - ULTRAISTA

Ultraista - Ultraista
Temporary Residence, 2012

I've written about good taste and records before. Generally, I'm of the opinion that good taste is largely a curse; the bands and artists whose work deliberately appeals to good taste are rarely satisfying listens. While albums and bands can, in hindsight, seem to devolve into good taste (Bark Psychosis being a prime example with Hex, an album so perfectly in line with what's now "good taste" its wonder must surely be imperiled for the first time listener), there's a certain something--Fredric Jameson might call it an old-fashioned, modernist, "unique" style--that elevates such music above its influences, confluences, references, and progeny. Ultraista's self-titled debut album comes carefully packaged in not just good, but excellent taste. The press blurb on Temporary Residence's website notes the band's fondness for "Afrobeat, electronic an dance music, visual art, and tequila," a set of influences that lead them to produce their album "of highly infectious, exquisitely crafted electronic kraut-pop." To make it even more appealing, of course, the album is available (for a limited time only! Act fast!) on coloured vinyl. Oh, and it's Nigel Godrich's (he of Radiohead-producing fame) band, along with session musician Joey Waronker (famous to me for his drum work on R.E.M.'s Up) and Laura Bettinson, so you know the kids will love it.

To put it bluntly: Ultraista are not capable of transcending their good taste. Indeed, their good taste is so conspicuous, so all-encompassing, that the album becomes kind of interesting despite itself. Good taste in music like this often registers as pleasant anonymity--it sounds good because I know it sounds good, so it doesn't actually have to sound like anything--and Ultraista's debut is no exception. The concern to appear hip turns the album into a rigidly controlled screen, a surface that's impossible to get beyond. Studiously mixing the same three or four elements (essentially: metronomic, Teutonic funk drums; buzzing, swirling synths; icily detached vocals), the band's sound presents itself as a blank, a cipher. You can hear anything in this music: it's contemporary (parts of sound more like The King of Limbs than The King of Limbs did, others are vaguely in line with chillwave), it's retro (crucially, though, it draws from the 1990s rather than the 1980s, all mid-period Stereolab and early Broadcast), it's indie that has a shelf of European techno on vinyl to impress visitors with. For the most part, it's not even possible to distinguish the songs on the album by saying "that's the one with the . . ." or "it's the one that goes . . .," because its compositions are more of a piece than Music for Airports. In short, it's aggressively bland in its good taste, its pleasant anonymity.

This is where it gets interesting, though, because nothing can be so bland and anonymous without transforming into something else. One of the most overworked remarks on a piece of music is Brian Eno's description of My Bloody Valentine's "Soon" as the "vaguest music ever to have been a hit," but I honestly do feel that something similar is at play with this album. Just when it's on the point of dissolving, when it has reached a point of maximum blankness, it becomes bizarrely appealing. Temporary Residence credits the musicians with "masterful control over the pure anatomy of a pop song," and the description is not wrong, though for different reasons than the label would suspect, I think. This is pop music transformed into observed pop music--it knows very well how pop songs work, and it's able to demonstrate how they work to the listener without ever doing the things pop music does. This isn't music that inspires an emotional response in the way that a Top 40 hit will, but it offers a clinical deconstruction of how the Top 40 hit does this by turning the pop song into the unreachable world behind the screen of Ultraista's music.

Take opener "Bad Insect," which rewrites Radiohead's "Bloom" and suggests how pop music can be exhilarating without actually ever raising your pulse. Emotionally, this music is flat, devoid of affect, and more interesting for it. The minimalism in terms of sound design works to the song's advantage in focusing attention on the surface. This is taken to even greater extremes in the middle of the album, with "Our Song" and "Easier" anonymous enough to become almost offensive, to retain a certain grain of reality, a kind of productive irritation that suggests the songs are as much theorizing about the music they sound like as functioning as actual songs. Indeed, the album falters at its busiest, when the spell of its good taste, its vagueness, is broken. The songs that fall victim to this (hyper)activity become genuinely irritating, as on the grating "Smalltalk" or the chirpy "Static Light."

Perhaps the oddest song here is "Gold Dayzz," which ends up with a kind of sub-Trish Keenan vocal that sounds lazy in the wrong ways, a curse that also plagued the Godrich-helmed King of Limbs. Bettinson's detached vocals are put to quite good effect elsewhere, though, as on "Strange Formula"--which is practically sub-zero in its icy loops of voice and synth--or the brilliant closing troika of "Party Line" (the album highlight), "Wash It Over," and "You're Out." What makes "Party Line" immediately noticeable is its deviation from the rest of the album's tonal palette. Foregrounding a piano line that feels snatched out of an adult alternative song designed to soundtrack graduations, the song supports itself with buzzing synths and a gently insistent bass that work brilliantly to catch the ear. The final two tracks are content to drift along aimlessly, threatening to lose all semblance of form at any moment, to lose sight of the pop structures they so carefully work to ape and to dissolve into pure sound, and the better for it.

Ultraista is, ultimately, an odd release. It seems too studied and mannered to have had its most appealing qualities (vague formlessness, anonymity) in mind. Nevertheless, the songs here tend to work as a kind of new twenty-first century ambient art-pop, plundering the cool bits of the past and reassembling them into the precise shapes that are now able to be only just heard and distinguished from the general background noise of life--a YouTube video playing in the background of your cubicle while you do work, the sound turned down so as not to disturb coworkers. Ten years ago it would have been a hit, and ten years from now it might be again (or it might sound like nothing at all, its good taste silencing it), but at this moment Ultraista's debut is weirdly adrift. As I listen to it, I think about Neil Kulkarni's "A New Nineties" series at The Quietus. Whereas his columns reclaim an alternative decade to the Alternative decade, Ultraista are like a band of Rip Van Winkles who fell asleep when bands like Eleven were making albums like avantgardedog and that dog. were making Retreat from the Sun and awoke in 2012. Whether there is any place for them (or any point to them) remains the question, though; where Rip eventually settles into a blissful senescence, free to be the idle raconteur he always wished to be, I think Ultraista will never quite find another time they fit into.

REVIEW: LEE RANALDO - BETWEEN THE TIMES AND THE TIDES

Lee Ranaldo - Between the Times and the Tides
Matador, 2012

I've been waiting for this album since grade nine. That's when I bought Goo, then an album that was ten years old (I didn't know who Chuck D was or why people made such a big deal in reviews about him being on the album, nor did I have any idea what the PMRC was or why I should smash it), and fell in love with not just Sonic Youth's music, but Lee Ranaldo's songs in particular. My brother had a handful of SY albums--Daydream Nation, Dirty, Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, and A Thousand Leaves--but they'd never made sense to me. I knew they were supposed to be cool, though, and as I started to learn about things like "indie rock" and "college rock," I felt an obligation to go back to those albums. Daydream Nation was for me, as it was for many people, the way in: "Teen Age Riot," "Silver Rocket," and especially "Candle," but gradually "'Cross the Breeze," "The Sprawl," and "Trilogy." It took a long time for "Eric's Trip," "Hey Joni," and "Rain King" to make sense, but eventually they did. Something about "Mote," Lee's song on Goo helped with this. It was weird and alien. I didn't understand it or what it was trying to do. I did know that when he sang "I am airless / a vacuum child" it sounded so cool, but also so elegant. Thurston was effortlessly snotty, but Lee seemed intriguingly enigmatic and mysterious. Why didn't he get more songs?

By that time, I'd started listening to contemporary Sonic Youth. "Karen Revisited" [sadly, there are only edits on YouTube] was mindblowing; in his review of Murray Street, Rob Mitchum talks about the song's "ultraviolet feedback," which is such a perfect way of describing its beauty. Once that settled--and as I began to explore the back catalog more fully, finding gems like "In the Kingdom #19" and "Pipeline/Kill Time" or "Karen Koltrane" (those first notes! that first line!!!)--Lee continued pumping out great songs, even if he only got one or two per album: "Paper Cup Exit," "Rats," and "Walkin Blue" were all highlights of their respective albums. My friends and I used to talk all the time about an album full of Ranaldo-penned songs. We took our favourites from the various albums we owned and made each other mixtapes of them. I had a friend who was convinced that "Wish Fulfillment" was Lee's greatest song. I disagreed. I usually went with "Karen Koltrane."

About three years ago, I started to hear rumours that a Lee Ranaldo solo album was for sure in the works. When nothing came of it, I chalked it up to other things I really wanted but would never hear: a follow up to Loveless, a Nick McCabe solo album, a new For Carnation record (to pick just a few). Late last year, though, Matador announced that a Lee solo album was coming in March. By January, there was a single from the album, "Off the Wall". As of today, the entire album is available for streaming at Drowned in Sound (see the link in the photo caption). I was anxious before I pressed play. "Off the Wall" was decent, but it didn't really wow me, and if that was taken as the best way into the album, then I felt this did not bode well for my chances of enjoying Between the Times and the Tides as a whole.

Thankfully, mercifully, nothing could be further from the truth. This album is exactly what I want from a Ranaldo solo album and exactly what I needed that album to be (I should note: I know he's released other solo albums before; I mean a solo, song-based album). This is not to say that it is revolutionary or that Ranaldo is really doing anything new here: if you've been listening to college rock, indie rock, or some permutation thereof at any point in the last twenty years, you should feel pretty comfortable here. In some ways, this album is a lot like Murray Street in that it feels like a conscious engagement on Ranaldo's part with a kind of classic rock impulse. This is obviously the work of a man who loves Television and the Grateful Dead, but it's also the work of a man whose music helped to shape things like this and this. Indeed, not just due to the presence of Nels Cline on the album, Between the Times and the Tides most resembles Wilco, a distinctly American take on rock music of the past four decades, one that values Chapel Hill as much as Seattle, Southern California as much as downtown New York, though the dominant aesthetic is firmly shaped by early and mid-1990s indie.

The albums opens with the most Sonic Youth-sounding guitar line on the entire album (it wouldn't have sounded out of place on The Eternal), though one that quickly gets transformed into something like a '60s psych lead when the rest of the band comes in. "Waiting on a Dream" is relaxed and spacious even with its pounding drums, the kind of album opener that a 56 year old who's heading into his fourth decade of his recording career should be making. The mix is busy, full of guitars and touches of organ, but never overstuffed. If it wasn't such a pejorative, I'd say it sounds professional, a song that knows what it needs to do and goes about doing it. It feels much shorter than its six minute running time, and it gets the album off on the right foot. "Off the Wall" still feels slight, even in the context of the album--it's just slightly too close to an anonymous rocker--but it's followed by one of the album's highlights, "Xtina as I Knew Her," another dreamy, romantic reflection on lost time and lost people from a guy who can already claim at least two masterpieces in that category. The bridge and guitar break just past the halfway mark is stunningly beautiful and the long instrumental coda highlights just how the good the musicians Ranaldo has surrounded himself with are (aside from Cline, there's Jim O'Rourke, Alan Licht, John Medeski, and Steve Shelley, among others). Cline's solo--I'm assuming it's his--on "Angles" is unbelievable, a cross between a malfunctioning video game and a modem that possesses a weird, shimmery melodicism, and whoever is responsible for the warbling/screaming leads on "Hammer Blows" (is that an instrument or a voice?) deserves serious credit.

The second half of the album is the stronger of the two, though. "Fire Island (Phases)" cuts between molten rock and country-esque shuffle, exploding just past halfway into another furious guitar break (this is nothing if not a great guitar album--cf. the ecstatic solo on "Lost" for yet more proof) before finishing in breezy, lyrical territory that highlights Ranaldo's facility with hooks. "Shouts" with its cymbol wash and prominent organ reminds me of late period Talk Talk, of all things, while the lyrics seem to make reference to Ranaldo's participation in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The spoken word bridge (by Ranaldo's wife, Leah Singer) is an arresting moment, and the high point of the album for me.  Penultimate track "Stranded" actually one ups Thurston Moore at his own game, an acoustic ballad with some gorgeous pedal steel work that feels cut from the same cloth as "The Shape is in a Trance"/"Massage the History." Closer "Tomorrow Never Comes" is the great lost Alternative Rock single of 1995, all angular melody and casual vocals with an unashamedly big chorus and some more wonderful guitar. The way Ranaldo draws out "Survival" at the end of the second verse is just perfect, an example of one of the classiest deliveries in rock at work.

For as great an album as this is--and it is a great album whether you're a Lee Ranaldo fan or just a fan of interesting rock music--I can see an argument being made against it. Ultimately, there's little here that's going to assuage the fears of those who claim that rock is finally, once and for all, dead. It's difficult to imagine Between the Times and the Tides sounding any different had it been released at any point in the last 20 years. Really, it wouldn't have sounded totally out of place as a kind of double release with Thurston Moore's Psychic Hearts (1995), to say nothing of his Trees Outside the Academy (2007) or Demolished Thoughts (2011). Of course, the days of Sonic Youth as an actual revolutionary force were over long before they became the kind of band who marketed exclusive compilations through Starbucks. Nevertheless, it's hard to begrudge the fact that Ranaldo doesn't take more chances here given how lovely the results are. His previous solo ventures, and his ongoing Text of Light performance group, are plenty more in line with his avant leanings, for those who are interested.

For me, right now, I'm happy that one of my favourite singers and guitarists has made an album that celebrates and illuminates his voice as a songwriter. It doesn't tell the whole story--there's no "Eric's Trip," no "NYC Ghosts and Flowers," and no "Karen Revisited"--but it covers a remarkable amount of territory. In the liner notes, Ranaldo writes that "Songs can go a million different ways. Thanks to some amazing friends who stopped by to play and sing, this group of songs went to some wonderful places. Unexpected. I hope you like where they ended up." I can't say there are any places I wish these songs had gone instead. This is the best SY-related project since at least Murray Street, and I don't really expect to hear a better rock album this year. Thanks, Lee; it was worth the wait.