Review Summary: A toast - to here knows when.
At this juncture, pretty much everything that needs to be said about My Bloody Valentine – from the swirling, all-asphyxiating toxicity on show in
Loveless to the embryonic genius of their debut record
Isn’t Anything – has been said at least twice over. Yet,
EPs 1998 – 1991, a compilation of the band’s three Creation Records EPs –
You Made Me Realise,
Glider, and
Tremolo – along with the “Feed Me with Your Kiss” single and several other rare and unreleased songs, manages to add a significant footnote to the band’s well wrought legacy.
And that's not just because newcomers “Angel”, “Good For You”, and “How Do You Do It” are perfectly fine additions to the MBV canon. Rather, there’s actual merit to be had in actually being able to string songs like “Drive It All Over Me” and “Feed Me with Your Kiss” back-to-back without having to get up to swap 12 inches on your record player. And who would have thought that a song as sparsely arranged as “I Need No Trust” would still sound so impeccably vital more than a tenth of the way into the 21st century?
Elsewhere, long-forgotten thrills – like the piano-wire garrote of “Instrumental No 1” and the woozy, disoriented pitch-bending of “Glider” – are reincarnated in glorious, crisply remastered form. Those numbers in the compilation’s title are clearly meant to be indicative: even if you have no idea who My Bloody Valentine are, there’s no way that you could mistake this for something released in the past decade. To borrow a cliché that’s as old and well-used as the band itself - they just don’t make ‘em like they used to.
