So what can My Bloody Valentine fans expect from the long-awaited Loveless reissue? Bliss. Like, it's totally, you can't even describe. It's like a migraine made of vicodin, man. It's like the aurora borealis, but made of guitars, and you're getting blown by a cherub (made of guitars). Imagine you're overdosing on Xanax inside God's vagina, and there are some guitar sounds related to that. It's like, the original was pure sonic perfection, but this is like, even more perfect? Because there's more presence and most assuredly some additional warmth.
And what can the rest of us expect? Well, the original album consisted of some murmuring, plus lots of guitars and some more guitars. Now, thanks to miraculous new mastering technology, it's louder. According to Kevin Shields himself, the first disc of the reissue is exactly the same as the 1991 release but with the volume turned up; the second disc, freshly mastered from the original analogue tapes, sounds almost exactly like the first disc. Read the interview yourself and try to tell me that's not what he said.It's amazing how much effort is spent on preserving “heritage rock” artefacts (and surely MBV are slowly but surely heading into that ossified canon, as the kids for whom they were a formative experience head into middle age, with an acute awareness of the fleetingness of youth and the disposable income to scrabble desperately against it); almost as if one's teens and twenties were as close as one got to being one's true self, and everything that followed was an anticlimax, a betrayal of oneself and an awful compromise with the crushing forces of boring adulthood on the long slog to the grave. So we cling on to our youth (which, as time goes by, becomes increasingly represented by a collage of the consumer products consumed during it), spending money on doing so, and some of that money goes to pay Kevin Shields to spend four years making Loveless sound slightly louder.
The article goes on to reveal some of the features of the new reissue:
Many listeners have noted a jarring digital glitch present in the remastered "What You Want," which may seem like a significant oversight in a project that's been in the works for four years. However, it's actually an Easter egg for dedicated fans: when slowed down a bit, the glitch is actually over thirty hours of shelved My Bloody Valentine music from Kevin Shields' various abortive attempts at a Loveless follow-up.
Thanks to the overall loudness boost of the new mastering job, playing "Sometimes" at high volumes reveals the repeated brittle snap of Kevin Shields breaking off tremolo arm after tremolo arm and yelling "for the love of god, will somebody please fucking bring me more tremolo arms," followed by the sound of engineer Alan Moulder crunching through piles of fallen tremolo arms like so many autumn leaves and creakily screwing a new tremolo arm onto Kevin's long-suffering Jazzmaster even as he continues to bash out wobbly chords.