The Case Against My Bloody Valentine's mbv

My Bloody Valentine certainly isn't for all tastes, and it's healthy to be wary of hype. Feel free to choose the hour of greatest MBV fan triumph to chime in with your opinions on why they're overrated, and prepare for everyone to pause their enjoyment of a significant new album to appreciate your bold, iconoclastic opinions and superior critical discernment.

Merit: 4/10

5. mbv won't revolutionize indie rock the way Loveless did.

That's true, but come on! Cut the poor guy a break, will you? This kind of talk is part of why he didn't release anything for so long.

Merit: 2/10

6. Who cares? Some other obscure shoegaze band already made the perfect Loveless follow-up years ago.

Oddly enough, this one pops up regularly in web comments. It's inevitable that plenty of bands would have cracked the Loveless guitar code by now, but to imply that the presence of well-crafted imitators should diminish the excitement around authentic My Bloody Valentine material seems beside the point.

"Beatlesque" wasn't the primary quality that made The Beatles good; when they stopped making new albums, the world didn't just switch to Badfinger without missing a step. Most of us weren't waiting for a new My Bloody Valentine album just because we needed another hit of Jaguar tremolo wobble, I suspect-- maybe we wanted to see how Kevin Shields had developed as an artist.

So, if you see some nerd drop a comment about how Sexy Kid Toyama's Nimbosphere is actually a superior Loveless successor, feel free to tell that guy to stuff it-- he's probably the same dork who spent the 2000s comparing Interpol to Joy Division.

Merit: 0/10

See Also: A Deeper Shade of Shoegaze

7. m b v caused the Super Bowl power outage.

This one is true. Partially my fault. Sorry, everyone.

Excruciating autobiographical detail: I was out of town without a laptop when the record came out, and I suffered through a night of frantic text messages from friends telling me how fantastic it was; upon returning to civilization on Sunday, I had to go straight to a friend's Super Bowl party with no time to sneak in a listen. Luckily, he was also a big MBV fan-- one with a good stereo, to boot-- so he agreed to mute the Beyonce spectacle and blast a bit of m b v at truly harrowing volume during the halftime show.

The first track, enjoyed at jet-takeoff decibels, cleared the timid from the room in seconds. The remaining brave few watched the insane Beyonce spectacle on a projector as "only tomorrow" and "who sees you" pelted us with guitar thunder; it all eerily synced up, leading to a room-melting psychedelic odyssey of sound and vision.

When we snapped out of it, the guys on TV were wondering what had blown out the stadium's power. We knew very well what did it.

Merit: 10/10

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