Friday, June 21, 2024

Chris Scott - My Bloody Valentine - Melody Maker - December 5 1987

MY BLOODY VALENTINE

December 5 1987

Wellhead Inn, Wendover

by Chris Scott

To hear loud guitars you needn’t cower in grimy London hell-holes while more Americans take themselves seriously, still convinced that grunge in inextricably connected to the intestines of life. In a pleasant country pub, not 50 yard from the Ridgeway prehistoric footpath, My Bloody Valentine kicked up a floor-to-ceiling din for the hell of it, then had the cheek to sing, ‘Let’s fall in love, it’s exciting.

Imagine Radio 2 in 1967, pleasant sub-psychedelia, overloaded with a howling of static that could only come from an H-bomb explosion. Some musical constructivist has celebrated 50 years of the Soviets by nuking the summer of love on the spot.

Forget the devaluation of ‘perfect’, ‘pop’, ‘noise’, words which now hold all the promise of unsold fanzines mouldering beneath a thousand beds. My Bloody Valentine are an awesome barrage of charm and crackling electricity, wrenched into motion by sheer physical force.

Guitar textures? A 12-string is produced, making even more of a screech, and still sounding like a bell. Maybe they can’t name a chord, but this is science made exquisite.






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