MY BLOODY VALENTINE Schallplatten & CDs

Review: First arriving in 1988, the debut album from My Bloody Valentine really is deserving of re-appraisal and reissue, albeit most musos out there won't have exactly forgotten it existed in the first place. Still, there are a whole lot of ears out there that were born too late and may not have discovered its wonders yet simply because they have far too much back catalogue greatness to unearth, and so this is a great opportunity to get stuck in, for want of better words.

The Irish dream pop and shoegaze pioneers do get pretty loud at times, but overall this is noise being used in a very different way to the vast majority of guitar styles before or since. Hence the record stunning critics of the day, with the sorely-missed Q magazine perhaps publishing the most apt description, from the mind of one Stuart Maconie: "The first full-length expression of this remarkable new sound: gossamer vocals and insinuating melodies glimpsed through sheets of blurred, opaque noise."

Review: Some 33 years after it first hit record stores, My Bloody Valentine's debut album still sounds undeniably fresh. Isn't Anything, which appeared on the back of two similarly ground-breaking EPs, genuinely moved guitar-based music forwards, in part by combining Kevin Shields and company's more traditional alternative rock inspirations - think Dinosaur Junior, Sonic Youth and the jangling sixties psychedelia of the Byrds - with then cutting-edge production techniques, subtle nods towards hip-hop and an impressive dedication to achieving layered, immersive sound. Sometimes loud, gnarled and intense and at other times becalmed, dreamy and otherworldly, the album remains breathlessly inspiring all these years on.