When My Bloody Valentine released their third studio album m b v in 2013, nearly 22 years after its predecessor Loveless, it was often interpreted as a kind of footnote to Loveless, an attempt at reviving the past, rather than treated as a bold aesthetic statement on its own merit. Although universally acclaimed on release the shadow of Loveless looms large over it, and the feeling among many listeners was that it was in a sense a half-successful attempt at recapturing what was special about Loveless. This is a mistake. m b v is a masterpiece in its own right, an album that critically assesses its own relationship to its predecessor and, by evoking the lost time in between releases, creates a far more melancholic, pensive statement that manages to be all the more beautiful for its active engagement with its own inevitable failure to be Loveless.

In an essay on Cy Twombly’s sculptural work titled “Beauty that Falls” Giorgio Agambem writes:

There comes a point in the creative course of every great artist of poet, when the image of beauty that, up to that moment, he [sic] had pursued in a seemingly continuous upward movement, suddenly reverses direction and becomes visible vertically, in its fall.

m b v is exactly this sort of reversal; all the elements of Loveless are there but recombined, eroded. Beginning with the album cover we can see the way that m b v echoes Loveless, the vibrant pinks and reds of the latter replaced with deep melancholic blues. The title itself is a nod to the band’s awareness of their own cultural position, taking the fans’ abbreviation for the band’s name signals their engagement with what has come before, the legacy of My Bloody Valentine. From the beginning of opener “she found now” the quiet, understated building of the track marks a direct contrast to the energy of Loveless’ opener “Only Shallow”. At every turn on m b v the band takes the formula of Loveless and breaks it down, undermines it, as if contending with the legacy of their last album, weighing up the time that has passed between the two and actively engaging with this absence by imbuing the opening tracks of m b v with a sense of loss that is not present on Loveless. The riffs and hooks of Loveless are almost entirely absent, and where they do exist, are so layered with distortion, so warped beyond recognition that they echo Loveless in the exact kind of reversal, the “fall” described by Agamben. And it’s incredibly beautiful.

The best example of this process of “falling” is third track “who sees you”. The track has all the hallmarks of earlier tracks by the band but with aspects removed, it feels entropic, as if the old songs themselves have aged, like the passage of time between their albums directly weighs on the music itself. Towards the end of “who sees you” a melodic riff bursts through the haze and it’s reminiscent of “When You Sleep” but decayed, as if it has been run through William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops.

While “When You Sleep” is a track that could quite happily be played at a party, “who sees you” is for the comedown, the morning after, the memory of the party years later. Where “When You Sleep” implies presence, “who sees you” evokes distance, the tone of the former is like a confession of love spoken directly to someone or a rehearsal of a coming confession, while on the latter the feeling is of looking back, imagining conversations that never happened. Where “When You Sleep” is youthful, “who sees you” is aged.

m b v is an extension, a refinement of the techniques and aesthetic developed on Loveless with a kind of subtraction, many elements are removed in the first half of the album so that it forms a kind of diptych in its contrast with Loveless.

From Agamben again:

[falling] is the point of de-creation, when the artist in his [sic] unparalleled style no longer creates but decreates

This is the exact process employed on the first half of m b v; a gradual removal of the aspects of indie rock that informed Loveless and a smearing out of the sonic textures, breaking them down. Loveless performed the gravity-defying feat of pulling melody out of noise, sculpting noise rock into a pop mould. m b v is a U-turn, taking the sounds of Loveless and degrading them, moving them back towards noise.

The true strength of m b v is, much like Loveless, its sense of duality, of a cocktail of different emotions swirling together (writing for The Quietus on its release, Ned Raggett described it as “like being hit on the head with a shovel and falling into a well half filled with honey”). Where there is melancholy and loss on m b v there is at the same time bliss and euphoria, both within each track and in the structure of the album as a whole. The process of subtraction that marks the first four tracks reaches its peak on the minimal “is this and yes”, a series of ethereal synth drones with Bilinda Butcher’s dreamlike vocals floating in the mix. This track acts as a kind of centrepiece for the album around which the tone hinges, their aesthetic stripped down to its roots and after which there is a departure – they begin building their sound up again almost from scratch, adding layers until it culminates in the chaotic maelstrom of album closer “wonder 2”.

Far from being a mere “reunion album” whose main merit at the time of its release seemed to be taken as not being a disappointment, m b v engages critically with My Bloody Valentine’s own legacy as a band, breaking down the unique aesthetic of Loveless and employing the nostalgia associated with that album deliberately in order to undermine it and extend their sound in new directions. m b v is nothing close to an attempt to recreate an earlier sound but is in fact a stark departure from Loveless, an act of “de-creation”. This produces a strange, enigmatic and compellingly beautiful album that is “fallen and risen in every instant”. It deserves to be regarded as a classic as much as its predecessor.