Soon, by My Bloody Valentine

This was the object of my desire.

Pure energy: fuzz and buzz, feedback, delicious distortion that becomes an absolute wall of sound. There was something spectral, an eery, thick-layered ambience that shrouded this song-not-song, something that wasn't like anything I had ever listened to since The Jesus & Mary Chain.

Sure, it was the early nineties so I was obsessed with Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation and all of Lush's albums. I was still not sure about Curve's Döppelganger but was as in love with Toni Halliday's voice as I was with Kim Gordon's, Emma Anderson's and Elizabeth Fraser's. But My Bloody Valentine had it all: the flange, the reverb, the melancholy, the noise, the sadness, the drive, the name. For me, in 1991-2, My Bloody Valentine was, indeed, the definition of love: a mixture of fear and desire, passion and pain, pleasure and danger.

Loveless was a fundamental piece of my sentimental education. It provided the sound of early mornings and lazy noons, the soundscape for unmade beds and sticky blankets. Soon, the last song of this providential, visionary album, was the perfect summing up of what My Bloody Valentine was all about.

Lyrically and musically, they had all the terrifying sexyness of a slasher film (hence the reference in their name). Kevin Shields's guitar was, literally, an ax, or rather, a chainsaw: it cut through the thick air-walls of mainstream conformity with a subtle violence that could only resemble the painful, groundbreaking epiphany of truly, madly, deeply falling in love.

Soon was a declaration of love, but also an alarm call, a wake-up siren, a shattering of the numbness of everyday's tedium vitae.

Wake up
Don't fear
I want to
Love you
Yeah don't go there
I let you get to me

Soon still has the power it had fourteen years ago, when we walked, like them, shoegazing, irrevocably falling, forever in love with the ground beneath our feet, afraid to look up but full of rage and passion and desire. It opens with drums that wound you like a machine gun. And then the labyrinth of sounds: you drown in the echoes of lost loves and fears. You are within a hurricaine of emotions. This is the flowing of crimson-red blood translated into pure, perfect pop.

Needless to say, they were not understood at their time. They did not even chart in the U.S., let alone in any country south of the border. But the British Isles felt their twirling, reverberating distortion shake their landscape.

Feel the buzz. Let your hair fall down on your face. Look down. Dance. Feed yourself with their kiss. You are still on time. Let yourself feel.

Soon.


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