Come back
My Bloody Valentine - 'Soon' (Loveless - 1991)
Despite being one of my favourite songs, I’m sure it would win if I listed my favourite songs of 1990; writing about this song as an album closer has proven quite tricky.
Firstly you have that detail on the year 1990. ‘Soon’ first appeared, albeit in a slightly different form, on the Glider EP some 18 months before Loveless came out. Even with the tortured process of recording and releasing it, that is a big gap. Given Kevin Shield’s legendary levels of perfection/procrastination, follow up m b v appeared 22 years later, so we shouldn’t be too churlish. A near 18-month gap could have The Beatles releasing a retouched version of ‘Ticket To Ride’ as the last track on Revolver to go to an extreme comparison. Regardless, this is the first time we had featured a piece on The Run Out Grooves that had appeared over a year before it ended up as an album closer.
Secondly, like many great closing tracks, it is played on some radio stations as a stand-alone song, which gives it a life away from the parent album in the same way it did for most of 1990 and 1991. I remember former NME scribe Andrew Collins playing ‘What You Want’ on BBC 6Music, a dozen or so years ago and pointing out that such is the build-up from the last minute (the “dying, eddying embers”, as he calls them1) or so of that song to ‘Soon’ we naturally expect to hear it next and not hearing it is almost traumatic.
In the second paragraph, you might also notice I refer to ‘Soon’ as a piece, and that’s not just the work of an over-zealous grammar check because it is difficult to describe what My Bloody Valentine did with Loveless and almost all of their career as songs. Because that puts them in the same category as ‘Happy Birthday’, ‘Stayin' Alive’ and ‘Hey Ya’, which it isn’t really. It’s more of a sound collage, something to wash over you2 and experience than enjoy by tapping your fingers on the car dashboard.
Then there are the lyrics, which I now know through the course of working on this entry but, very much in keeping with the preceding forty-two minutes, are more about how the words sound coming out of Belinda Butcher’s mouth than what they mean - if anything.
So what does that leave us with? Well, we can talk about the drums. Watch this YouTube video on kz5k’s channel of him drumming along with it. I say along, but you’d be forgiven for thinking the drums don’t match the song if you didn't know.
As I watch this, I imagine the temptation he must be feeling to pivot his body and add a drum fill, a bit of improvisation against the simplicity of the beat. That break-beat style could be a feature of hip-hop or house record of the time. Still, there is also tightness and rigidity in what it is doing, along with the woozy and shimmer - it sounds like Colm Ó Cíosóig is on the point of nodding off before he shakes off his micro-sleep and gets back into his groove alongside bassist Debbie Googe.
I guess that’s where the real genius of this song exists; even within their compact discography, there are plenty of My Bloody Valentine songs that deliver on the promise of walls and waves of shimmering guitar, experiences which are akin to having a train rush past your ears for minutes at a time. No, this is one that, along with Primal Scream’s ‘Loaded’, released two months before the Glider EP, pushed the boundaries of where indie, rock and electronic music could inhabit to more expansive territory. They probably pushed it so far that few were prepared to take up the opened up space in the same fashion. You don’t get drumming like this on anything derivative of Loveless - it might be an ethereal record that dazzles with the air of hypnosis, but it won’t have a beat with such a square jaw, broad shoulders, and the strong suggestion it knows how to dance.
Andrew Collins wrote a piece on his Circles of Life blog in 2014 that covers this song, and I’d advise you to read it as it makes many points that I won’t be making - as they have already been made far more eloquently by someone who was there at the time.
Or, as I found out in 2008, to bludgeon you over the head in a live setting.