You Made Me Realise EP
(Creation 1988)
The You Made Me Realise EP is a conceptual clearing point. My Bloody Valentine conceived a piece of work that in 1988 sounded unearthly and shocking, especially when considering the state of commercial material in the same genre that was haemorrhaging under the debilitating influence of the pallid wares of a once glorious baby-boomer generation and the synthetic pop production techniques that were ushered in by technologies that made it possible for the unimaginative to mass produce the banal at a faster and consistently horrifying rate. But how did they clear this conceptual space while at the same time deliver such an original sound? For me, here are five reasons why these five songs are so special:
1. Quiet/Loud/Soft/Hard: The title track with its clanging cacophonous refrain is intermittently punctured by fragile voices offering both a soft and hard and a loud and quiet dynamic. This leads to the notorious climactic extended explosion of noise in the third third of the song. As the drums change pace and the guitars rev up like the blast of a jet turbine an unavoidable aura of tense anticipation grips the listener forcing them to wait expectantly for the cacophony to release its uncompromising grasp (1).
2. Songs About Fucking: “Slow” one of the many songs by My Bloody Valentine that dwells in the hinterland and on the vagaries of sex, of having sex, experiencing sex and wanting sex. “Slow” has a bass line that befits the subject matter and its tempo, as it drives into the song like the slow rut of a sexed up animal, only to ejaculate into a crescendo of frenetic pounding.
3. Drumming as Architecture: In “Slow” and the following, “Cigarette in Your Bed” the drums are integral to the song architecture. They build and create spaces for the different, sometimes unusual, (for the time) noises to flourish or intensify while also providing an exhilarating release. On “Cigarette in Your Bed” the drum-fills that tumble forward in the moments before the guitars detonate like tiny bombs of radio interference, and also accompany the voice like a concurrent rhythmic conversation, masterfully structure the track to guide all the elements at play, which feed off and into one another with a cycle of irregular time signatures.
4. WTF is that Guitar Noise? The guitar noises are unearthly and can easily be misinterpreted as music that reverberates from other instruments or even imagined as a voice that comes from other noise making devices. The squeal that opens “Slow” screeches like the scream of a civil defense siren. The guitar wail in “Thorn” propels into the ear like a vicious mechanical circulating earworm that's hungry to penetrate the tympanic membrane.
5. The Machine and the Ghost: All bands are machines, living organisms that form a machine like unity, to deliver regular sounds in time and space. Except the My Bloody Valentine machine loses it’s materiality as the noises engulf the quiet guiding voices. It’s almost as if the angry mechanism overwhelms a singing ghost that sings to operate and give life to it. The last track, “Drive It All Over Me,” particularly presents a world of ghosts and machines, even a masculine/feminine dichotomy.
You Made Me Realise isn’t just the realisation of a band discovering, flourishing and finding themselves or simply delivering five songs and five mechanisms that influenced hundreds of later bands (2), but rather one EP that revealed to the world a unique way of performing and creating. This EP made us all realise that things could be done differently.
Notes
1. I was once a passenger in a car as “You Made Me Realise” came on the stereo and the holocaust part (the rising guitar noise) caused the driver to become anxious and grip the steering wheel with such force that his knuckles turned white and the car began to speed up.
2. Not merely the shoegazers.
