My Bloody Valentine’s imperial EP phase

There’s an unconscious hierarchy at work in retrospective assessments of bands’ discographies, particularly indie bands from the late-1980s and early-1990s, which sees albums (i.e. long-playing records, or LPs) as more ‘important’ than other formats, including singles, extended-play records (EPs) and compilations. Apart from the extremely rare picture-disk format, which I will never speak of again in these pages, I believe this bias in favour of the LP is unjustifiable.

Take My Bloody Valentine, for example. Yes, their debut LP, 1998’s Isn’t Anything, was innovative, exciting and groundbreaking. And I am not disputing the fact that their 1991 follow-up, Loveless, is anything short of a miracle, even if it did allegedly break the Creation bank. But if I had to express my true feelings, I’d say the two EPs the band released in between Isn’t Anything and Loveless (namely, the Tremolo and Glider EPs) sum the band up perfectly.

This may, of course, have something to do with the fact that I only discovered My Bloody Valentine for myself in 1990, two years after the release of Isn’t Anything. It’s an album that still, somehow, leaves me cold, as if I was simply too young to appreciate its late-1980s take on post-punk. But, again, the two EPs the band released in 1988, for ‘You Made Me Realise’ and ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’, respectively, rather prove my point about EPs. They’re amazingly good. There’s no logic.

Glider was released in 1990, just in time for me to fall in love with the triumphant ‘Soon’, and its gestures towards the ‘indie-dance crossover’ genre (which was never really a genre, despite the existence of records like Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, which broke all the rules of both indie and dance). Indeed, while ‘Soon’ is eminently danceable, it’s also a powerfully immobile song, its brutalist guitars soaring and reverberating in infinite, non-laser-guided, directions.

I have always liked the other tracks on Glider, including ‘Off Your Face’ and ‘Don’t Ask Why’, and even managed to sit through the terrifying instrumental, ‘Glider’, a few times, although I could have dedicated the eight minutes I spent listening to the full-length version of same doing almost anything else. For some reason, Andy Weatherall’s reworking of ‘Soon’ passed me by. In hindsight, it meets the indie-dance crossover criteria in full, although that’s not difficult for a 12″ remix.

In 1991, a friend of mine bought the Tremolo EP on vinyl. Of the EP’s four ‘proper’ tracks (it also features three instrumental segues), ‘Honey Power’ is by far the standout for me. It is just the ultimate ‘in-your-face!’ indie blast, and we listened to it on repeat until we could hear no more. ‘To Here Knows When’ was a foretaste of what Loveless would turn out to be: dreamlike, shimmering and featuring vocals that sounded as if they’d been recorded in outer space.

In November 1991 (hat-tip: John in comments!), I saw My Bloody Valentine play at the University of Sydney Refectory, with New Zealand’s Straitjacket Fits as support act. MBV’s Kevin Shields did not say a word for the entire set, apart from some lyrics he sort of hummed into the microphone during songs, words you could not in fact hear anyway. At the end he approached the microphone, thought better of it then left, just like Robert Smith when the Cure played the Entertainment Centre a few years later.

In contrast, Straitjacket Fits’ lead singer Shayne Carter was a strange beast lyrically, but at least he had something to say. In the words of one reviewer [citation needed, LOL: probably me], the Fits “wiped the floor” with the grandparents of shoegazing that night. Having listened to Flying Nun’s excellent Straitjacket Fits career retrospective, I can undertand why. They were spookily, alarmingly intense, their buzz pop sound channelling Elvis Costello and MBV at the same time.

Incidentally, the highlight of Straitjacket Fits’ sporadic career was surely second album Melt, featuring classic songs like ‘Missing Presumed Drowned’, ‘Down In Splendour’ and ‘Bad Note For a Heart’. But they also issued a couple of rock-solid EPs, including their debut release, 1987’s Life In One Chord, which featured ‘Dialing a Prayer’ and ‘She Speeds’. Honestly, bands spend entire careers coming nowhere near that level of songwriting.

I felt kind of sorry for My Bloody Valentine, in the end, when Loveless finally came out with ‘Soon’ tacked onto the end of it (and ‘To Here Knows When’ crammed in the middle). It felt like the Stone Roses’ eponymous debut, repackaged to include ‘Fools Gold’, which was never available on the original LP. I guess that’s why the EPs still do it for me. Loveless signalled the end of My Bloody Valentine’s imperial phase, and they haven’t issued a single EP since. I think that says it all, frankly.