walking upstream…
My Bloody Valentine
photo: martie donohoe · cc by-sa 3.0 ↗My Bloody Valentine
In Dublin in 1983, drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig and guitarist Kevin Shields formed a band chasing noise, not songs. "We started out as a band that was really into The Birthday Party and Einstürzende Neubauten," Shields told Mixdown, "quite physical, quite aggressive… it's that wildness." My Bloody Valentine spent years mutating through a goth phase and a Jesus and Mary Chain-style noise-pop phase before Shields began bending chords past their pitch with a Fender Jazzmaster's tremolo arm, dissolving them into pure texture. That discovery, first unleashed on 1988's You Made Me Realise, became 1991's Loveless — an album so obsessively layered it nearly bankrupted its label and took the band twenty-two years to follow.
the sound in question
1990
SoonMy Bloody Valentine
walk the tributaries ↓
Ramones1970s · Punk rock
When thirteen-year-old Kevin Shields first heard the Ramones, he told Far Out Magazine, "I found them really strange, like aliens from another planet. They didn't look human." What hooked him wasn't songwriting but Johnny Ramone's brute simplicity: "I learned that in order to play guitar like Johnny Ramone, it takes a huge amount of physical effort. A lot of people at my school could play the 'Stairway to Heaven' guitar solo, but they couldn't play three chords of a Ramones song." Shields never learned a scale; he reached for a tremolo arm instead.
listen: upstream & heresource: Far Out Magazine — The musician that made Kevin Shields want to play guitar (Ramones/Johnny Ramone origin story) ↗
1976
Blitzkrieg BopRamones
1988
You Made Me RealiseMy Bloody Valentine
listen for"Guys like Johnny Ramone are like machines," Shields told Rolling Stone. "They're like aliens. It's not the normal rock guitarist expressing his ego onstage." Blitzkrieg Bop is that philosophy in its rawest form — Johnny Ramone's relentless, monotone down-picking, no solo, no showing off. Listen for the same instinct on You Made Me Realise: the song abandons its verse entirely for a two-minute wall of guitar noise, feedback generating the sound rather than a player performing it.
Sonic Youth1980s–90s · Noise rock / Alternative rock / Experimental rock / No wave
By Loveless, Shields had stopped resisting his record collection. "It was good because we were letting ourselves be more Sonic Youth-y," he told Arthur Magazine, "more of our influences in a way." What drew him wasn't distortion for its own sake but a sense of a band caught live on tape: "a real sense of it being bands playing and capturing it purely on tape," he told Denver Westword. "British groups, in general, have a tendency to use more effects, be more studio-bound." Critics assumed Loveless was the opposite — pure studio artifice.
listen: upstream & heresource: Arthur Magazine — Perfect Sound Forever ↗
1988
Teen Age RiotSonic Youth
1991
Only ShallowMy Bloody Valentine
listen forSonic Youth's Teen Age Riot opens on nearly ninety seconds of detuned, shimmering guitar drone before any song structure arrives — noise first, melody second. Only Shallow does the same trick in miniature: it opens on a single warped, pitch-bent chord. "Three pedals I refused to use in that era were chorus, flanger and delay," Shields said. "The only thing I used was reverse reverb." Both tracks make you wait inside the noise before the song underneath reveals itself.