The Post-Rockist

Continuing with our revitalized interest in 1990’s guitar bands, Irish shoegazing demigods My Bloody Valentine are officially reunited, recording, and more amazingly, preparing to tour. For years the ol’ rumor mill had churning out tall tales about the impending follow-up to 1991’s ineffably beautiful Loveless, so when The Daily Swarm reported that MBV would be reuniting to perform at the 2008 Coachella festival, I just scoffed and thought, “Yeah, that’s gonna happen - right after MJ and Macca record a new album of duets!” Turns out, for once, my sarcasm was unjustified. While the Coachella performance is still unconfirmed as of this date, the following times and places are guaranteed to feature Kevin Shields and company:

June 20, 2008 – London, UK – The Roundhouse
June 28, 2008 – Manchester, UK – Apollo
July 2, 2008 – Glasgow, UK – Barrowland

Tickets go on sale this Friday, November 16th. Tickets for all shows will be available at www.seetickets.com and venue box offices. Unfortunately, this post-rockist will be nowhere near these sure-to-be legendary performances.

While the tour dates were just announced today, the world officially learned of My Bloody Valentine’s plans for reuniting and releasing a new album on November 6 when Kevin Shields sat down with Ian Svenonius of VBS.tv’s Soft Focus for a half-hour interview in an empty English pub during the middle of the day. The first part of the interview is embedded below, and the remaining three parts can be found here. If you can make it through Ian Svenonius’s pompous affectations and pretentious questions about Time and History and Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, it’s actually a decent interview. Kevin Shields offers up many interesting tidbits of information, from his love of the Ramones and the Partridge Family, to his illogical beliefs on climate change, to the plans for the hotly anticipated album of shoegaze lore. For instance, Shields states:

We were making a record in the 90s, around when the band broke up in 1995…and I continued with Belinda. We kinda made we made most of an album….It’s going to be this ‘96/‘97 record half-finished record finished, and then a compilation of stuff we did before that in 1993–94, and a little bit of new stuff.

I pretty much know what the one that’s going to come out this year is going to sound like because its already pretty much 3/4’s done already…it sounds like what we sounded like – different but not radically different. People will go, “Yeah, it sounds like My Bloody Valentine.”

Holy shit.

Can I just say, as the hopelessly biased and uncritical critic that I am, that I’m already in love with this album?

Listen in:

There’s no word yet on when the new My Bloody Valentine record will be released, or even if it will be released like a proper album supported by a label or if they’ll drop it unsuspecting on the web, Radiohead-guerrilla style. A good bet, however, would be to check the band’s new website: http://mybloodyvalentine.co.uk/. In the meantime, why not, here’s another video.

“You Made Me Realise”

-Posted by Todd