The Return Of My Bloody Valentine

true, but the correlation in this case is problematic to me

i can understand why MBV, Dinosaur, Sonic Youth etc.. are loud live bands.

Slint,for example, who resemble mogwai style, are quieter.

i saw mogwai once, and though the loud effect was exciting, afterwards i thought that this was the only virtue of the show, and without it, the show might have been kinda boring.

Well that's cos Mogwai's music is intrinsically boring, even loud.

which strengthen my argument, that the loud live show becomes a sort of a gimmick

ehhhh, i don't know about it being a "gimmick". being loud is a musical decision that affects how the listener experiences the song.

low plays very slowly (or, they used to). if they would speed up their songs to a medium tempo, it wouldn't feel the same. is low playing slowly a gimmick too?

I think the argument is more that if every live show had Low doing their songs at sprightly upbeat tempos, that would be a gimmick.

yeah, cause they play slow on records too, arent they?

oh, i must be misunderstanding what nostomo was saying. mogwai is loud on their albums (at the climax of many of their songs, at least), and they're also really loud in concert. and then nostormo was saying that without the loudness, the show would have been boring, and that it was sort of a gimmick. so all i'm saying is just that low is slow, both on their records and live. so is that a gimmick too?

anyway, no big deal

I think you're missing this key sentence: i never understood why they are so loud live, as oppose to their relatively quiet records. whats the excuse?

"mogwai is loud on their albums (at the climax of many of their songs, at least)"

arguable.

at the show,i remember they blew my ears from the FIRST Bass note.

anyway, no big deal

oh, whoops! sorry, i was kind of skimming this thread in between pounding out last minute emails here at work.

Mogwai albums are only ad loud as you put your stereo surely? I've always thought of them as a loud band.

If you are a regular gig goer get flat response moulded earplugs. Expensive, but the best investment you will make, and will save you many times that amount on hearing aids when older.

I like quite a few of Mogwai's albums but I found their live show boring, and pointlessly loud.

My LP/CD copy of m b v arrived unscathed despite the comedy packaging. I sat it on the table and my cat hopped up, looked at it thoughtfully, then reached out a paw and scratched three claws into the sleeve.

When my blood pressure had returned to normal I put the CD on (turntable out of commission) and fuck me if the mixes don't gel far better. I had been playing 24/48 ALAC via my phone in a dock, but my CD player is a fairly decent Rotel 971 and makes most albums sound pretty good. So I'm still glad to buy physical media.

Mogwai tricked me cos of the whole "post rock quiet on record" thing and I saw them in 2002 sans earplugs, and after a 10 minute "My Father My King" I went outside for a smoke and could not hear anyone talking for about half an hour, I remain convinced that gig singlehandedly damaged my hearing severely.

I of course went to both MBV gigs with pro earplugs as a result (my hearing's screwed for other reasons so I now cant risk it any further).

Hey had this been linked here before? Interview with Bilinda back in October!

http://totallydublin.ie/music/music-features/butchers-block/

thanks ned

Very interesting interview, thanks for that.

For some people, Loveless is looked upon as the Holy Grail of indie rock and people say that you would never ever make an album better than that. What do you think?

Now I think it’s a good thing we never released anything more. It would just have been a charade.

To be fair, that was from 2007 before even the first reunion shows.

Must have been.

That comes from my grandfather. If I’d been a guy I would have been named Bill, but since I was a girl it became Bilinda. John Peel once said on his show that I was being pretentious and tried to be special by spelling my name differently. That bugged me. That’s the name I was given, it’s in my passport! But I didn’t have the energy to write in and complain.

The song titles were really twee, like Sunny Sundae Smile and Paint a Rainbow. It sounds very innocent but the lyrics were very dirty. Paint a Rainbow is about necrophilia and there’s some really disturbing images in that song.

o_0 HOW DID I NOT REALISE THIS WTF.

What about the Shield's mix of Mogwai Fear Satan?

its fun to revisit the lyrics of Paint a Rainbow when you find out what the song is about

conway was a hell of creepy lyricist

Well he chose the name of the band

They were totally gothabilly when they first started tbrh. I mean "Moonlight", gah. "you wear a stone/for each of your hairpins".

So who is playing the drums on Isn't Anything? From the sound of that interview *everything* was recorded by Kevin.

it's obviously colm

Yeah, my understanding is that the band played on Isn't Anything, and Loveless is all Shields, but who really knows? I doubt the band do after all these years and all these drugs and so on.

(xp) That's what I thought, firstly because it's a distinctive style, but secondly because if it was Kevin there's no reason why he would have used programmed drums on Loveless. I assume it's Kevin on mbv, though?

In that most of the the drums on m b v are boring percussion sample loops, yes. My main irritation with the record.

isn't anything was the last record with conventional/linear studio recording origins, afaik; they booked out a place in wales & did it as a group. colm's drumming on that record - & the eps, like glider - is still so monumental. loveless is apparently all kevin apart from bilinda singing, & w/colm entirely responsible for touched. i was just listening to mbv on the subway, it's interesting how the drums are kinda indicative of the mode they're operating in, now; like they obviously aren't the propulsive crash of the live-drum IA/EP stuff, & yet they have this kind of live weight to them. some of the new songs have an almost tropical feel to me. like they're very clearly coming from a pretty standard band line up but they're floating a little along with that.

Kevin doesn't like Colm's drumming because he says it's out of time.

fwiw, I prefer the drums on mbv to loveless

there are drums on loveless? somehow thinking of loveless i don't hear drums in my mind, except on "soon" but that is drum programming, i suppose. even if there are drums on loveless, it is definitely not for the drums that i love that album.

Only Shallow begins with some pretty iconic snare hits! I guess they're programmed, though.

+ : my record (and some smaller, metallic-looking coaster companion?) finally arrived in the mail today.
- : it looked like this:

http://i.imgur.com/LC05wEj.jpg

it's true that i have no intentions on selling it or anything and the record itself sounds great, but i still wish someone would have put any thought whatsoever into the shipping, especially when this thing cost me $40.

I thought Kevin played, rather than necessarily programmed, a lot of the drums on Loveless.

I believe it was samples of Colm's drums, which were then chopped into hits a rolls and sequenced.

Hits and rolls.

Maybe I'm in a minority, but Colm's clattering rush adds a whole new level of thrill and complexity to the Valentines. He should be live on EVERY TRACK. Imagine how dull "Nothing Much to Lose" would be without him. And with him, it's one of my all time favourite songs.

Colm - if you're reading this, I was the fortyish guy whose mouth dropped open when he spotted you outside the barbecue tent in the roasting heat of Altona.

matt's bbq valentine

Aw man what they were wandering round in the food court at ATP? Just my luck.

Well - I saw Colm wander around, being a smallish guy with greying hair in a grey t-shirt he was easy to miss, in fact I don't think anyone else twigged!
Kev walked through the inside foyer later but had a small retinue with him as you might expect. Apparently a very approachable guy though.

I'm embarrased to realise/admit I would not have twigged it was Colm in a million years anyway which is sad cos hes kind of my fave part of the MBV thing. I love his drumming.

THen again I didnt go outside that often, it was too brutally hot.

In my nerdy attention to detail, it sounds to me like there are four songs with live drums on loveless - only shallow, when you sleep, come in alone and what you want - and the rest is programmed. I could be wrong though. I don't think Debbie Googe played on either Isn't Anything or Loveless.

If you read one of the interviews with Shields around that time (early nineties) he explains the drumming thing. Can't really remember but I've got it somewhere. Something like the drums on Loveless are programmed on anAtari but with Colm's 'feel', because his drumming is out of time.

With regards to Debbie I think he said she only played on one album and an ep, but don't quote me on that.

The 33 1/3 book on it goes over this. It's drum-machine exclusively, but Shields claims that he made them human enough to resemble Colm. Admittedly, I didn't deduce them as 'machine'd from the get-go, I just thought it was a subtle and maybe a bit weak approach to the new sound post-Isn't Anything. Subdued drumming, minimal flair.