File this post under “Awesome Gifts from Katie”.
A while back, I came across the 12″ vinyl release of My Bloody Valentine‘s 1988 EP, You Made Me Realise. We were over at the house of friends of friends and there it was, just sitting face-out in their considerable record collection, calling to me.
No, I didn’t steal it—what do you think I am, a monster‽
First off, for anyone who doesn’t already know, My Bloody Valentine is a noise-pop band that formed in Dublin in the early 80s. More importantly, on a personal level, they are one of my all-time favorite bands, providing a touchstone for hundreds of musicians to come and for me as music-loving teenager just figuring out who he was.
Their sound, which they were just beginning to find themselves when they released the EP—their first release on the seminal Creation Records; built out from an earlier two-song 7″—was something I always thought of as beauty wrapped in noise. Their use of heavy distortion, pitch-bending, and other dreamy effects situated them firmly in the newly coined genre of shoegazing, but Kevin Shields + company took that sound to the next level, culminating in the epic 1991 full-length, Loveless.
But before that and the slow-motion break-down of the band over the years to follow, came You Made Me Realise, a five-song EP that begins with the title track—a rocking, cacophonous, ear splitting number— and ends with “Drive It All Over Me” which I still hold high as one of the finest pop songs of all time.
I had bought the CD version when it was released in the US, but, with its iconic, slyly dangerous album cover (one of my favorites ever) and the growing obsession with vinyl Katie + I have developed in the wake of the digital music revolution, the original, larger-than-life 12″ became a musical holy grail as soon as saw it.
So a heart-felt ‘thank you’ to my dear love, Katie, for knowing me so very well and being so very generous.
In an attempt to share the love, below you’ll find said fine pop song.
Though rumors of new recordings have been rampant since the band’s 2007 reunion, it does indeed seem that—according to Shields via the band’s Facebook page—a new album has been recorded and mastered as of December 21st. So fingers crossed, Reader. Fingers crossed.
