Wonder 2

The final track on m b v announces itself as something unprecedented even within My Bloody Valentine's catalogue of unprecedented things. It begins almost normally and then accelerates into a simulation of jet-engine catastrophe — sheets of noise that stop resembling guitar sound and start resembling industrial machinery, air pressure changes, the acoustic experience of velocity rather than music. Kevin Shields has described this as his attempt to approximate the sound of traveling at extreme speed, and the achievement is literal enough that the song becomes genuinely vertiginous for stretches. Underneath the noise wall there is a melodic substructure, almost comforting in its persistence, the way a memory of calm persists inside panic. The drums drive forward with relentless momentum. The vocals are buried to near-inaudibility, which is itself a statement — this song has moved past the human scale into something larger and more indifferent. Contextually it closes the long gap between Loveless and m b v with something that refuses nostalgia, that insists on going further rather than revisiting. You don't put this on for comfort. You put it on when you want your nervous system genuinely altered, when you want music that physically occupies the space around you rather than simply filling it.