The best My Bloody Valentine album, according to Ride
Shoegaze, a genre allegedly coined due to members typically gazing at their shoes, assessing a vast array of effects pedals, was briefly the hottest music moment in the UK as the 1980s passed into the ’90s.
Inspired by the neo-psychedelia and dance culture trickling around Manchester and America’s indie, dominating the underground, groups like Chapterhouse, Lush and even an early Blur all coalesced around the brief but influential moment in British music.
The shoegaze ‘Big Three’ were all on Alan McGee’s Creation Records. My Bloody Valentine would endure as the movement’s defining band, Slowdive’s longevity would be cut short by a vindictive music press that would trash the band not long after praising them, and Ride would meet near equal critical acclaim as MBV but be swept aside with the nation’s fickle pop trends as the 1990s rolled along.
While early LPs Nowhere and Going Blank Again were lauded as shoegaze marvels, the stomach for feedback-soaked indie blasts swirling around unintelligible vocals swiftly waned as Britpop’s nostalgia kicks swaggered into the pop charts and scored the ensuing ‘Cool Britannia’ cultural frenzy. Blur jumped from ‘She’s So High’ to ‘For Tomorrow’, Suede resurrected glam decadence, and Oasis threw a bit of glam, punk, and mod into their anthemic rock attack and seemingly quashed shoegaze for good.
Everything sees a comeback eventually. As a new generation of Gen Z music fans shoved Britpop’s 1960s rehash aside, the shoegaze pearls so derided in their day found a new audience besotted with their blistering serenity and transportive indie swirl. While Ride members existed in a fractious state with solo careers and side projects, a proper reformation saw Ride play a 2015 Coachella set and embark on a new set of studio albums for the 2010s.
Around the release of Interplay, Ride’s bassist Steve Queralt was asked what his favourite MBV record was, and he opted for their 1988 debut, Isn’t Anything. “Miles better than Loveless in my opinion,” he told whynow in 2024. “This is when it started to get really interesting for me. Rather than the usual wash of noise which everyone associates with MBV, there are acres of space and experimentation on this record. The woozy tunings, buried vocals and the genre-changing use of effects made this a groundbreaking record. It’s actually quite a suffocatingly dry-sounding album. I don’t think it’s ever been matched. It’s certainly never been bettered.”
While gargantuan slack guitar would pummel on the dreamily abrasive Loveless, Isn’t Anything offers a disquieting rush of lo-fi widescreen density and dreamy hooks. Recorded during a severe lack of sleep for all concerned in the little Welsh studio, songs like ‘Feed Me with Your Kiss’ tap into the fraught and wiry indie attack MBV were able to conjure. But, with the shoegaze smog less thick than later, the album summoned to see verses or scraps of songcraft in partial clarity.
It’s an astonishing record, and while few would agree it’s MBV’s finest, Isn’t Anything undoubtedly stands as one of the finest debut albums of all time.
