Blow

"Blow" arrives as a surge of compressed noise and fractured melody, sitting in the earlier, rawer corner of My Bloody Valentine's catalog before the band had fully refined their haze into something ambient. The guitars here feel deliberately crude — less a wall than a grinding surface, distortion applied with a kind of blunt force that still contains hooks buried deep enough that you have to lean in to catch them. The rhythm section is relatively prominent compared to later work, giving the track a propulsive quality, almost nervous energy underneath the texture. Kevin Shields' vocals are half-submerged, delivered with the characteristic detachment that made the band's early sound so unusual — not emotionless, but displaced, as if the feelings described are being transmitted from somewhere slightly out of phase with the present moment. The emotional register is unsettled, hovering between infatuation and disorientation, desire that doesn't quite know what it wants to do with itself. This belongs to the late-eighties UK noise-pop moment, when bands were pushing guitar texture into new territory, but MBV were doing it with a pop instinct that set them apart. It's the kind of song for late nights when the city sounds slightly wrong, when something is pulling at you from a direction you can't name.