The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
My Bloody Valentine · produced by Kevin Shields · self-released through the band’s website · about 47 minutes
Mode
Guitar noise as weather; the band’s own glide-guitar language kept, stripped to keyboard and voice, and made to run
Mythos
Sleep to flight, evoked in sound: the record wakes in a drumless haze and ends under an engine in the air
Phase
Nine tracks in three groups of three: a long, slow first third; a shorter, lighter middle hinged on a keyboard track; a last third turned to speed, closing in Wonder 2
Presentation
Album; self-released as a download through the band’s website on the night of 2 February 2013, with orders taken for CD and vinyl; the site failed under demand
Register
Guitar bent continuously off and on the note, voices laid inside the mix, a held keyboard, the breakbeats of drum and bass
Scale
A single sensibility listening: drowsiness, attention, intimacy, and the machine as sound
Governing Proposition
A band returns twenty-one years after its last album with nine tracks in three groups of three, begun in the 1990s and released in a single night, and makes a record of sensation: a sound that will not hold still, with the voice laid inside it as one layer among the others, carried from the drumless drift of its opening to the speed and engine roar of its close. The record finds that intimacy can be a state without edges, and it finds little else. It is made with exactness and rises often, and it names almost nothing of the world.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record begins with no drums. A slow haze of layered guitar rises and falls, warm and low, and a murmured voice moves inside it without coming forward. Nothing happens, in the sense in which songs make things happen; the sound holds, like weather, and the listener is let in without being addressed. It is beauty without event, and it sets the terms of everything after: a sound that will not hold still, and a voice that is one layer of it rather than a speaker standing in front of it. The record begins as if waking were optional.
The architecture is nine tracks in about forty-seven minutes, and the tracks fall into three groups of three. The first third is long and slow: She Found Now, Only Tomorrow and Who Sees You. The second is shorter and lighter: Is This and Yes, If I Am and New You. The third turns to speed: In Another Way, Nothing Is and Wonder 2. The record is built from blocks, not as one continuous arc, and the blocks can be heard as blocks. Each third has its own idea of what the band’s sound is for.
The band is Kevin Shields, Bilinda Butcher, Colm Ó Cíosóig and Debbie Googe, and Shields produced the record. He began the material in the mid to late 1990s; in 2007 he said an album was largely done, and in 2012 that it had been mastered. The record is the end of a long making, and the joins between its thirds carry the marks of it. The history does not explain the record, and it does not excuse it. What is heard is the record as it was released, in its order, and what that order does with what the years produced.
Movement II
The first third holds three versions of one mode: a slow wash, with a bent lead guitar over it. In the second half of Only Tomorrow that lead rises in a long, bending line, the first true height of the record, made by a note that refuses to land. Only Tomorrow is the strongest single song here and also the one whose absence the sequence would survive. She Found Now is needed as the threshold, and Who Sees You as the mode carried to its extreme.
In Who Sees You the pitch never settles. The guitar wavers continuously off and on the note, bent with the tremolo arm while the strings are strummed, and the whole track sways as if the floor were moving. Listening becomes a matter of holding on. The effect is vertigo, and it is made pleasurable. It is also exact. The instability is the content of the track, not a colour laid over a song, and a version played in straight tuning would keep the chords and lose everything the track knows.
This is what the record brings into the open: the instability of the note itself, and through it a way of attending in which tenderness and drift are one condition. Intimacy here has no edges. The voices are set inside the mass at a depth that keeps them felt and unread, a choice of mixing and not a fault of it, and they address no one. That is a real finding about hearing, and it is nearly all the record finds. The words carry no statement that can be made out, and no human or social condition is named. What is disclosed is a mood of perception, rendered with great precision, and not a meaning that could be argued with.
Movement III
Then the guitar stops. Is This and Yes is Bilinda Butcher’s voice over a held keyboard, with no rhythm, for about five minutes, and it is the one place on the record where the guitar falls silent. It is the hinge between the first third and the last, and the absence is the point: after three tracks of guitar mass the record is heard for a while by what it has taken away. The track holds still without going slack, and its height is reached by withdrawal.
The rest of the middle third is plainer. If I Am is a short, loping song, the slightest on the record, and the one track whose loss would cost the argument nothing, since the case for plain melody is made better by the next. New You is the clearest pop song here, led by the bass, with Butcher’s voice nearer the front than anywhere else. Its title announces a renewal and leaves the content to the sound. Where the rest of the record rises, both stay close to level, and New You sits nearer an ordinary song than anything around it.
The record’s law holds even so. Is This and Yes and Wonder 2 are the two most distant things on it, a voice over a held chord and a breakbeat inside a roaring wash, and they obey the same rule: both keep the voice inside the sound, and both keep the tone in motion, one by drift and one by speed. The range is moderate. The palette is largely one palette, guitar mass and buried voice, and the joins between the thirds are audible. They do not break the law. They show where the making paused.
Movement IV
The last third turns to speed. In Another Way sets a fast breakbeat under a bright, repeated guitar figure, and the haze of the first third is made to run. The figure lifts over the drums into something close to exultation. The balance is exact: breakbeat and guitar mass are mixed so that neither swallows the other. The programming itself is basic for the idiom it borrows, and the drums of the first third, plain and sometimes boxy, show that rhythm was never the record’s first concern. Here it is made to serve the guitar, and it does.
Nothing Is follows, the one track without a voice: a single riff repeated over a drum pattern that gathers force, the same figure harder each time, until the insistence itself becomes a kind of dread. It is required where it stands. The last track needs a run-up, and Nothing Is is that run-up. A record that elsewhere drifts here pushes, and the push is made from almost nothing: one figure, and time.
This is the record’s principal departure, and it is partial. The guitar language, bent continuously, with the voice inside the mix and the tone laid in walls, was the band’s own. Drum and bass was twenty years old by 2013, and the revival of the band’s sound by others was well under way. Joining the two shows that a language built for stasis can carry speed and pulse without losing its haze, as Is This and Yes shows it can survive without the guitar at all. That widens what the idiom can do. It does not reorganise the field, and no sound or school can be shown to have turned on it.
Movement V
Wonder 2 closes the record. A drum and bass rhythm runs inside a roaring, circling wash like a jet engine passing overhead, and the track is transport and threat at once. It never resolves into one hearing, and its circling roar is the record’s most original sound. The record ends in the air, where it began in sleep. From the drowsing body of She Found Now to the machine overhead is an old pattern, but it is laid down by sound as atmosphere, and nothing between the two ends carries it.
The record was self-released through the band’s website on the night of 2 February 2013, as a download with orders taken for CD and vinyl, twenty-one years and three months after Loveless. The website failed under demand that night. The stake was the expectation of two decades, and the release, unannounced, risked it openly. A record begun in the 1990s was released in a night, over a site that gave way beneath it. The event was real; what it set in motion beyond itself is harder to show.
Thirteen years on, the record exists as it was made, and nothing of it is lost. Its breakbeats are sounds of the mid 1990s, not of 2013, so it was dated in one respect on arrival and in another never belonged to its year, and that has protected it. What it holds is small: consciousness as drowsiness, attention and drift; intimacy by tone; the machine as engine noise and programmed rhythm. The family, labour, the state, history and the sacred do not enter, because the record declines to name anything. Its scale is the scale of a single sensibility listening, and within that scale it is complete.
Act III · The Twelve
Nine tracks in about forty-seven minutes, and seven of them resist the subtractive test. She Found Now is required as the threshold and Who Sees You as the mode at its most unstable. The hinge and the close are compelled: Is This and Yes is the one place the guitar falls silent, and Nothing Is earns its repetition as the run-up the last track needs. The test bites twice, and that holds the figure. If I Am, the slightest song, could go without loss, since New You makes the case for plain melody better; and the first third holds three versions of one mode, so that Only Tomorrow, the strongest song, is one the sequence would survive losing.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The record brings a condition of hearing into the open, and brings it through sound, which counts as fully as statement. In Who Sees You the pitch of the guitar never settles, and listening becomes a matter of holding on. That is a finding about attention, and through it about tenderness and drift, and it can be stated and holds: intimacy here is a state without edges, in which the voice is one layer among the others and addresses no one. The finding is exact, and the form itself carries it. What holds the figure is that it remains a mood more than a meaning: the words are submerged and carry no statable claim, and no human or social condition is articulated.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Elevation is the record’s chief good, and it comes often. She Found Now opens in a low, warm haze, beauty without event. In the second half of Only Tomorrow the lead guitar rises in a long, bending line, the first true height. Who Sees You makes vertigo pleasurable; Is This and Yes is a height reached by withdrawal; In Another Way lifts its bright figure over the breakbeat toward exultation. Nothing Is reaches the dreadful sublime by insistence alone, and Wonder 2 closes in a roaring wash, transport and threat at once. If I Am and, less so, New You stay level, and the first third’s heights are textural more than climactic.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth is evoked and not built. With no figures, no story and almost no audible words, the particular never acquires archetypal weight, because the particular is never given. What the record has is a frame laid down in sound: it begins in sleep and drift, in the drumless murmur of She Found Now, and ends in the noise of flight, in the wash of Wonder 2 circling like an engine overhead. From the dreaming body to the machine in the air is an old pattern, and the thirds give it the record’s shape, from drift through plainness to velocity. What holds the figure low is that it stays atmosphere: no figure bears it, and New You and Who Sees You name renewal and recognition and build on neither.
Score: 6.9 / 10
The inheritance is the band’s own language: the glide guitar, bent continuously with the tremolo arm, the voice laid inside the mix, the wall of layered tone. The departures are two, and each is real. The last third joins that guitar to the fast breakbeats of drum and bass, so that a sound built for stasis is made to run, and in Wonder 2 the joining yields a sound of real invention, a circling roar; the middle third strips the language to keyboard and voice, and to plain song. The stake was the expectation of two decades, and the unannounced, self-made release risked it openly. What holds it below the bar is that the wager was placed on a proven path: the language was the band’s own, drum and bass was twenty years old by 2013, and the fusion fills one third of the record.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Change the form and most of what the record knows goes, because it knows how a sound feels as it is heard. The bending pitch of Who Sees You is the content, not a container; a straight-tuned version would know nothing. The voice set as one layer in the mix is its account of intimacy. Is This and Yes removes guitar and drums so that the absence is heard, and Nothing Is makes repetition the form of its force. The sequence runs from drift to plainness to velocity, hinged on the keyboard track, and the arc is real. What holds it short is that the thirds are also layers of a long making, and If I Am and New You are near containers.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Evidence first, and thirteen years supply some. The mixes repay return: the guitar layers separate on close listening, half-hidden voices emerge, and listeners have spent years parsing which parts date from the 1990s and which from 2012. The formal depth is real; Wonder 2 never resolves into one hearing. The semantic depth is thin. The words, being unheard, give the listener almost nothing to return to, and what the record means on the fifth hearing is close to what it means on the first. No book-length study, tradition of reinterpretation or reworking by other artists is known to have reopened it. Thirteen years have shown a depth that is real, and modest.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The contest is with the band’s own legacy and with the revival of its sound by others, well under way by 2013. The force is real and bounded: the last third shows that the glide-guitar language can carry speed and pulse without losing its haze, and Is This and Yes that it can survive without the guitar. That widens the idiom without reorganising the field, since the elements were the band’s own and drum and bass was long established. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the release was an event, but no practice, sound or school can be shown to have turned on it, and it confirmed a revival rather than altering it.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Survival is weighed over thirteen years. The form is whole and fully legible: the record exists as it was made, nothing of it is lost, and it has remained in print. The surface fixed to a moment is small and odd. The breakbeats of the last third are sounds of the mid 1990s, not of 2013, so the record was dated in one respect on arrival and in another never belonged to its year, and that has protected it. What holds the figure is the span itself, thirteen years, and a presence that is real but narrower than that of the band’s earlier work, below works of its decade with a wider public and far below what has lasted centuries.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high, and load-bearing where the guitar carries the meaning: the continuous bending of pitch, held while the strings are strummed, makes the instability of Who Sees You. Voices sit inside the mass at a depth that keeps them felt and unread, a choice of mixing, not a fault of it. The keyboard track holds still for five minutes without going slack, and the last third sets breakbeats against guitar mass so that neither swallows the other. The costs fall in every third, within a narrow palette: plain, sometimes boxy drums in the first, slight songwriting in the second, basic breakbeat programming in the last. That holds it below the rung where a making load-bearing throughout carries one fault, a tenth under Boxer and well under Loveless.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs most of the record: sound that will not hold still, with the voice as one layer inside it. The two most distant elements, Is This and Yes, a voice over a held keyboard with no rhythm, and Wonder 2, a breakbeat inside a roaring wash, obey it: both keep the voice inside the sound and the tone in motion, one by drift and one by speed. The bright pop of New You strains it, sitting nearer the front and nearer an ordinary song. The range is moderate, the palette largely one palette, and narrowness is not coherence. The joins between the thirds show, though they do not break the law.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for being an album. Consciousness is held fully, as drowsiness, attention and drift. Erotic intimacy is present, carried by tone more than by any statement the words make audible. The machine enters through sound, as engine noise and programmed rhythm, and the record carries the drowsing body of its opening into it at the close. Those are three orders, two of them carried by texture rather than held as subject, and a single sensibility listening holds all three; within that scale the record is complete. What holds the figure low is everything the record declines to name: the family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.5, then The Sublime at 8.4 and The Living Form at 8.3. A guitar that is the instrument of the record’s meaning and a mix that places every layer; elevation in six or seven of nine tracks, from the bending lead of Only Tomorrow to the roar of Wonder 2; and a form in which the bending pitch is the content, so that a straight-tuned version would know nothing.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: consciousness, intimacy and the machine, two of them carried by texture rather than held as subject, with the family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order absent. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 6.9, a frame from sleep to flight evoked in sound with no figure to bear it, and Pressure on Tradition at 7.1, a widening of the band’s own idiom on which no practice can be shown to have turned; then The Bottomless Well at 7.3, a depth of sound more than of meaning, and The Swerve at 7.4, a turn made on the band’s own proven path.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.0, The Unconcealment at 7.5, The Swerve at 7.4, Pressure on Tradition at 7.1 and The Archetypal Deep at 6.9 fall short of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 6.9, Pressure on Tradition at 7.1, The Bottomless Well at 7.3 and The Swerve at 7.4 fall below 7.5. The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 91.8, an average of 7.65 that displays 7.7, and the aggregate places the record in Tier III.
Basis · the album as released by the band through its own website on 2 February 2013, nine tracks in their published order, about forty-seven minutes, judged from knowledge of the recording and its documented making and release; no recording, lyric sheet or score was in hand. The album as released is the unit, and the tracks are evidence for the whole. Later pressings, the later reissue and live performance are not part of the work and bear only on its reach and survival. The words are sung low in the mix and are not reliably intelligible; no lyric is quoted, and songs are cited by title. Track lengths are given only roughly. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the players of individual parts, the recording equipment, the dating of individual tracks within the years of the making, the terms of the physical issue, and the date and terms of the reissue.