Along with the remastered versions of Loveless and Isn’t Anything, My Bloody Valentine recently released this collection through Sony Music comprising all four of the band’s Creation Records Era EPs and some rare tracks. You Made Me Realise signifies the time My Bloody Valentine became bona fide originals. Prior to that, few called them great and many had written them off. Next comes Feed Me With Your Kiss, an EP that showcases the continuing development of the band and shares its title track with the first Creation album, Isn’t Anything. The next two EPs are companions to the epochal Loveless, at the time premiering ‘Soon’ and ‘To Here Knows When’ respectively. Of the first disc, the EPs You Made Me Realise and Glider are the two most significant parts, and probably the most important parts of the whole collection.
Compiling the EPs does a number of things, attention is drawn to the chronology of the track list—I cannot think of any other ways to have arranged these songs. Like the best retrospectives, this collection is narrative as well as pretty comprehensive.
The recounted tale begins with You Made Me Realise’s title track. In some ways it’s been tamed since the original CD version of 1988. There’s a generally sweet and smooth treatment that puts the first EP’s tracks, notably ‘You Made Me Realise’ in line with the later selections on the pair of discs. Not so much a soft focus as an expensive light filter on the lens. This is one of the tasks of mastering: collating tracks, possibly from multiple sources, and making them sound like part of the same release.
Of all the tracks in the collection, ‘You Made Me Realise’ feels the most altered. If you look on my table you will see that in preparing it for this collection, the average loudness has been increased while the peak loudness has been decreased. The net result, when A-B testing with average loudness levelled out by Replay Gain, can be heard in two areas. The original’s peaks are louder, which means that transient sounds like drum hits “come over the top” of the level set by their new equivalents. That, and the original has a zingier treble, this is probably due to the aforementioned smoothing and the greater emphasis on bass frequencies seen in this remastering effort.
Overall, though, the track still retains its fire for all of the primping. The bass has a pleasing throb to it and the interlocking play of the drums and bass serve as a clear reminder that My Bloody Valentine are a band with rhythm. The kick drum has a pleasing heft to it, with a real feeling of resonance at the human heart. The interplay of Kevin Shield’s and Blinda Butcher’s vocals is preserved without the subtleties made unbearably stark. The rhythm, the noise and the melody are all as vital as ever.
The infamous 'glide guitar' first rears its head in ‘Slow,’ along with the sensual lyrical sensibility that this EP and the next push into interesting sadomasochistic territory. ‘Thorn’ continues the sexual play while at the same time juxtaposing the noise of a mosquito sounding Kevin guitar and the janglier sound of 80s Indie. In its lyrics it carries a summation of the grittier first half of the Creation Era, 'You give me flowers but it’s thorns I give to you. The sex and the violence do not read like a tawdry shock tactic however, but rather the first hints of a grander collapse of individual perspectives and experiences first fully demonstrated in Glider.
‘Cigarette in Your Bed’ goes down tempo to continue the textural work of ‘Slow.’ Lyrically it continues in the pattern of encryption and abstraction, while the accompaniment stands as testament to the
band’s mastery of atmosphere. ‘Drive It All Over Me’ keeps the pop-morbid amidst a sense of languor reflected in the Blinda Butcher lead vocal. Though a bit whimsical, it remains a good representation of a band that had just really found its voice. It also attests to the greatness of the mixing of these tracks.
The Feed Me With Your Kiss EP picks up pretty much where You Made Me Realise left off. Shields is experimenting with darker sonics than the pinprick treble of the last EP. ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’ sees the voices of Kevin and Blinda, never strong, struggling to remain afloat amidst a torrid sea of overwhelming instruments. ‘I Believe’ is more evidence of the general brilliance of the Creation era EPs. The pop sensibility? Check. The storming rhythm section? Check. Those two integral elements are superbly met by masterfully arranged sound and more of the dark sensuousness that was, up until Glider, a My Bloody Valentine Hallmark. It is perhaps my pick of the EP, if I had to choose.
Then again, there’s ‘Emptiness Inside,’ which showcases the “glide guitar” in an essentially finished form. The thing I feel separates My Bloody Valentine from what is called Shoegaze is the overall dryness in the track—on the drums, the bass and the vocals. Things never get washed out by reverb, there’s not that sense of a wall erected between the listener and the band. This is perhaps one explanation for why My Bloody Valentine don’t sound like an anachronism (who successfully emulated them at the time?), just My Bloody Valentine. ‘I Need No Trust’ is a dark lullaby. Like other slow songs it operates as a showcase for the evolving textures at the command of Shields. The rippling guitar is almost like an analogue sequencer with its suggestion of arpeggiation. You might say that My Bloody Valentine have an 'open' sound in the sense that rather than hemmed in by the technological parameters of their time, they twisted the tools of their era or rejected them as fads. This yielded something that stands outside of any music and technnology progress narrative, though progressively better tools are undoubtedly a factor in the band's success.
After You Made Me Realise, the next breakthrough is in Glider. The EP sees the band beginning to lay the template for Loveless. While there is change, nothing is really lost. The big gain in Glider is a kind of visual synaesthesia that is somewhat distinct in the Creation era catalogue, a blissful crowding of white light and a persistent feeling of hypnagogia. The pattern begins in ‘Soon.’ Something that simply has to be experienced, ‘Soon’ represents the continuing and growing relevance of the “studio as instrument” cliché to the MBV project. With tight, attention grabbing mixing like a Dance Music track the stage is set for the superlative Kevin guitar to command the utmost attention, washing away all in the listener that is not of the experience of listening.
As ever, bass rhythm guitars and the first use of more exotic sounding percussion than before indicate brilliant rhythm. The vague, hard to decipher lyrics and the amorphous guitar contribute to a sense of slow joy through abstraction. The real genius lies in the use of dance music style sequencers (clearly evidenced in the intro), multiple forms of percussion and other sources of rhythm, beat, meter to maintain a sense of spectatorship on the part of the listener. It’s like being guided by the hand while at the same time realising that you have no corporeal form. Individual experiences and abstract yearnings are mediated through the mass poetics of the beat.
‘Glider’ is composed around the playback of looped guitars and guitar feedback. The track begins on a lovely fader ride (more studio as instrument). The sense of vague euphoria is maintained. Also included in the collection is a version of this song which goes on for a whopping 10:16! ‘Don’t Ask Why’ maintains the sense of light, both ocular light and the euphoric sense of being removed from daily burdens. The vocals are allowed to jut out of the mix more than in the case of ‘Soon,’ with a greater sense of interlocution that underscores the particular thematic importance of the interrelation of people in this EP (just look at the sleeve).
Glider is rounded out by the marvellous ‘Off Your Face,’ which underlines the sense of journey at the heart of the EP, both journey through mental states and journey into the other. The tempo increases to what could be termed the band in light to middling rock mode, and there is a return to Colm O’Ciosoig’s signature driving drumming style on the kit. The intermingling of the voices and their swooning repartee highlight the myth of the intersubjective. Low in the mix is a seeming vortex of sampled singing voices. Higher up, in the lucid reaches of the sonic scale, Butcher’s lead vocal is entangled by Shields’. It’s all a bit like that moment in End of Evangelion when everyone turns into primordial soup, flight from the body.
I believe it’s out of print but in my closing remarks here I felt I should draw attention to Simon Reynolds and Joy Press’s The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ‘N’ Roll. Their written portrait of My Bloody Valentine is what I would consider an essential rendering, though not a comprehensive one. By capping Disc One with Glider, My Bloody Valentine draw attention towards the ‘primal “we”’ suggested to Press and Reynolds by Loveless. Their use of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘”Body without Organs” (BwO) is particularly illustrative:
But MBV's androgyny runs deeper than the internal sexual dynamics of the band. Bypassing the thurst and grid of phallic rock, MBV's music is the seething, smouldering incarnation of what Deleuze and Guattari call the 'Body without Organs' (BwO). The BwO is an ungendered flux of intensities, 'waves and vibrations' of leasure and energy; its desire has no goal, target or object, just buzzes, in transitiviely.
Disclaimer: these numbers were obtained using my media player, foobar2000 1.1.7 with the Dynamic Range Meter 1.1.1 add-on component. Calculating dynamic range and average levels over tracks is a somewhat fraught process of questionable practical value (we listen with our ears). These numbers only serve as a rough guide to the direction of travel in terms of mastering. I do not have the equipment or the training to provide authoritative numbers; these are strictly guide values to illustrate change. They do not constitute proper qualitative analysis. If you were wondering, the numbers are negative because in digital audio loudness is expressed on a relative scale where the loudest a sound can be is 0dBFS (zero decibels full scale). As all of these values are relative, every value that is not zero is a subtraction from zero (the full scale and hence maximum value).
| Track | Old Peak | Old RMS | New Peak | New RMS | Old DR | New DR |
| You Made Me Realise | -0.90 dB | -13.13 dB | -1.45 dB | -10.53 dB | 10 dB | 7 dB |
| Slow | 0.00 dB | -12.81 dB | -0.61 dB | -11.49 dB | 11 dB | 9 dB |
| Thorn | 0.00 dB | -13.33 dB | -0.55 dB | -10.51 dB | 12 dB | 9 dB |
| Cigarette In Your Bed | -0.01 dB | -14.47 dB | -0.41 dB | -13.37 dB | 12 dB | 11 dB |
| Drive It All Over Me | -0.35 dB | -14.07 dB | -0.31 dB | -12.10 dB | 12 dB | 10 dB |
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