You guessed it! Today’s theme is “Songs Originally Performed by Drake”…
[Video][Website]
[6.62]
Alfred Soto: The shifting tonal tectonics of the guitars matter less than the not-so-subtle synth parts and the wounded sax parts with which it begins. Rather thin, though, and it faffs around a bit.
[7]
Anthony Easton: I’ve heard Loveless about once a year for the last decade. I borrow it from friends or the library or I find a download, and listen to it two or three times, and then put it aside. I don’t hate it or love it or like it — it is one of those cryptic texts that completely refuse to open up for me. I’ve talked about it, and read about it, sat in living rooms with musicians and critics who have pointed out its endless complexities, and still I am completely indifferent. That so many people I love respect it so much makes this closed quality completely frustrating, and seeing so many people so excited about the new album, and then hearing it — and then once again having no idea what is going on or how to work through it — is a profoundly isolating experience.
[5]
Ian Mathers: I accidentally opened the video in two different tabs, and only realized a couple of minutes in. It didn’t sound as good when I turned one of them off. I mean, most of it’s fine, but I have trouble taking the lead guitar starting at 1:40 seriously. Then again, I thought parts of Loveless were goofy the first time I heard it, too.
[5]
Iain Mew: I would happily listen to any ten seconds of this on loop apart from the laser bagpipe intro. The bit they’ve done it with, with synth-strings soothing a freaked out guitar that’s just right on the edge of too harsh, is a fine choice. I wasn’t even that into them before (blame the distance of time maybe) but I am impressed.
[8]
Patrick St. Michel: I’ve yet to actually listen to mbv in its entirety so maybe I’m totally wrong, but “In Another Way” seems to signal that My Bloody Valentine still sound like… My Bloody Valentine. Only the drums seem a touch more urgent, possibly a result of Kevin Shields’ interest in jungle. Still, this sounds familiar in the best way to anyone who has spent considerable time with Loveless, while also sounding a touch better than all the shoegaze acts that sprung up as a result of these guys.
[8]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: After a woozy, weird opening that sounds like the song’s being pulled through a cathode tube, the clean sound of the MBV pitch-bending guitars is startling – we are now hearing an analog band in a purely digital age. If anything, they sound odder as they circle relentlessly around dazily-remembered musical landscapes, all four members firmly in their own headspace before it abruptly cuts itself off (Colm Ó Cíosóig in particular, seems so laser-focused it’s scary). Finding out what Belinda Butcher is singing remains pointless, but let me tell you that that there’s a great run in the verses from what sounds like “meeorsuwaaayyy” to what sounds like “traaaaaaams!”. MBV still trippy mane.
[7]
Jer Fairall: The 30 minutes leading up to “In Another Way” on mbv constitute what may be the biggest pop-cultural anticlimax since The Phantom Menace (or might have, anyway, if Kevin Shields had managed to work some fart jokes and racial caricature into his latest work). So, if this blur of strangled guitars, awkwardly stately synths, drums tumbling over themselves and Bilinda Butcher’s disembodied coo drifting through the pummeling murk doesn’t produce quite the same feeling of sweet relief in isolation that it does in album sequence, it nevertheless ends up feeling like a solid, though hardly transcendent, My Bloody Valentine EP track. And given the frustrating unevenness of its parent album, perhaps that’s what it should have been.
[7]
Brad Shoup: Nice to see MBV haven’t abandoned the unique sensation of riding on the Hellevator: that peculiar placidity and static arrangement, interrupted by well-placed, stomach-catching chordal dropouts. Butcher’s vocal line emphasizes triplets, which she spreads all over some scale (chromatic? I wish I knew). Having already invented their wheel, Shields and company can finally be bothered to take us on a little ride. The final two all-instrumental minutes are decidedly non-grandiose, with a New Age synth carrying the topline and a guitar (or four) doing their best impression of a circus seal.
[6]