This week, My Bloody Valentine announced that, in addition to signing with Domino and prepping two new albums for the label, they were finally putting everything they released with Creation Records, where they were signed between 1988 and 1991, on streaming services. But that still doesn’t mean fans can stream the band’s entire catalog quite yet—and the convoluted reality of regional copyrights also means that many listeners won’t even be able to legitimately stream MBV’s entire Creation catalog right now either.
To be clear, the group’s rarely disputed heavyweight champ, 1991’s Loveless, and its nearly as stunning predecessor, 1988’s Isn’t Anything, have already been streaming for a minute. As have the pre-Loveless EPs Glider, from 1990, and Tremolo, from 1991 (at least in North America). What’s new is that listeners outside North America can now stream a 2012 compilation called ep’s 1988-1991 and rare tracks, and two 1988 EPs: Feed Me With Your Kiss and, arguably best of all, You Made Me Realise. Another welcome addition to the group’s streaming catalog is their 2013 comeback m b v. But, to make things that much more complicated, listeners in North America still can’t hear You Made Me Realise or Feed Me With Your Kiss.
Even if you’re lucky enough to live in a country with favorable MBV streaming access, focusing on the band’s Creation period leaves out their earliest work. Sure, only completists might miss the awkward goth-rock of their 1985 debut, This Is Your Bloody Valentine, or the Cramps-derived, rockabilly camp of 1986’s Geek! EP. But when MBV began blending their shrill squalls with the sweetness of ’60s pop—tentatively at first, on 1986’s Jesus & Mary Chain-aping The New Record by My Bloody Valentine EP, and with increasing definition across 1987’s “Sunny Sundae Smile” 12", “Strawberry Wine” 12", and Ecstasy mini-album—they scraped out some enduring fan favorites.
Here are five of the greatest My Bloody Valentine songs still missing from Spotify in North America. (Luckily, diligent YouTubers are making sure you can still hear them online.)
“Sunny Sundae Smile” (1987)
On the four-song “Sunny Sundae Smile” single, originally released only as 12" vinyl, My Bloody Valentine refined the fuzz-streaked, Sarah Records-adjacent pop they had tested out on the previous year’s more transitional The New Record by My Bloody Valentine. The sugary ebullience is evident right there in the name, and the title track in particular is an instant-crush ode that set a standard for future noise-besotted indie-pop acts like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. The other songs on the record, especially “Paint a Rainbow” and “Sylvie’s Head,” are still light-hearted but almost equally strong. MBV might rarely acknowledge their twee origins, but few bands were better masters of the form like they were here.
“Never Say Goodbye” (1987)
The three-song “Strawberry Wine” single, also initially pressed as a 12", was the band’s first record with singer-guitarist Bilinda Butcher. The A-side, no relation to Deana Carter’s mid-’90s country smash of the same name, is engaging in its own right, all guitar jingle-jangle and male-female harmonies—something like “California Dreamin’” meets “Mr. Tambourine Man” in a wee-hours London ecstasy den. But “Never Say Goodbye” is more fully realized. It’s propulsive and intoxicating in a more serious way than “Sunny Sundae Smile,” but with a more straightforward joy than My Bloody Valentine have ever displayed since. Shields and Butcher’s softly simpatico vocals hint at the way they would later entwine indistinguishably as they sing in the chorus, “Take me by surprise/Hide nothing from the shadows.”
“She Loves You No Less” (1987)
At the tail end of 1987, a few weeks after “Strawberry Wine,” the Bilinda-boosted My Bloody Valentine released Ecstasy, a seven-song mini-album that was reputedly limited to 3,000 vinyl copies. Another evolutionary step for the band, this time from ’60s-tinged psych-pop towards the full-blown shoegaze of Isn’t Anything and Loveless, the record was a minor hit on the UK indie charts and drew critical attention from both sides of the pond. The Bilinda-fronted “She Loves You No Less” is jangle-pop of the highest order, urgently recommended if you’ve ever liked Felt, the Clientele, or any of the acts in the Labrador Records stable. What this phase of MBV might’ve lacked in muscle, it made up in moody yearning.
“Slow” (1988)
Near the end of the ’80s, My Bloody Valentine were rounding into the indie equivalent of an imperial phase: They were in command, the world was ready, and they would define themselves for the rest of their career. Set against this historical context, the still-excellent Feed Me With Your Kiss EP feels anticlimactic—yet another moderate progression from a group that had been full of them. But You Made Me Realise, released earlier the same year, deserves its routine placement among the best EPs of all time. That said, its title track could hardly be considered a deep cut: “You Made Me Realise” is the song where MBV famously segues live into an umpteen-minute wall of pure noise, and Pitchfork previously ranked it as one of the 500 greatest songs since 1977. Fortunately, “Slow” is just as sublime, a work of swooning languor that brings the band’s simmering sensuality uniquely to the fore. With its trudging grandeur and vaguely seedy etherealness, this song could fit somewhere along a trajectory from the Cocteau Twins to Beach House. If MBV can have a penny for all of the times I’ve tried to look up “Slow” on DSPs and been disappointed, they might actually make some money from streaming.
“Map Ref. 41N 93W” (Wire cover) (1996)
My Bloody Valentine’s Chinese Democracy-worthy silence between 1991’s Loveless and 2013’s m b v is legendary, but the band did manage to release a couple of songs in the meantime. Both, curiously enough, were covers. One is a breathy, lavishly orchestrated cover of “We Have All the Time in the World,” the 1969 James Bond theme originally sung by Louis Armstrong (the title, you may suspect, was a bit cheeky). The other, a song truly for the heads, was this cover of Wire’s “Map Ref. 41N 93W”—originally a single off of the UK post-punk trailblazers’ landmark third album, 1979’s 154. MBV’s version recasts the catchy, herky-jerky original through a prismatic swirl and raises the question of how this band might’ve sounded if they had been putting out music when avant-pop successors Stereolab were at their respective peak. It’s yet another MBV track still worth digging into the digital trenches for.
