Nothing Much to Lose

There is a brutality to this track that early My Bloody Valentine wore more openly than they would later, when noise became beautiful rather than aggressive. The guitars here have a slashing, confrontational quality, and the overall atmosphere sits closer to the noise-rock and post-punk currents running through the mid-1980s London underground. The tempo drives without mercy, and the rhythm section pushes everything forward with a kind of impatience. The vocals carry a quality that is harder to name — not quite menacing but not comfortable either, circling around the idea of indifference or expendability, the sense that nothing particular is at stake and that awareness of that nothing is its own kind of damage. This is the band before they had fully developed the signature technique that would define Loveless, and the rawness is instructive — you can hear the aesthetic searching for its form, the aggression that would eventually be sublimated into overwhelming tenderness. Within the context of Isn't Anything it represents the harder edge of that record, the tracks that kept some connection to the physical world rather than dissolving into pure sensation. Reach for it when you want shoegaze that hasn't yet forgotten its anger, when the softness needs a memory of what it replaced.