MY BLOODY VALENTINE Vinilo y CD

Review: First arriving in 1988, the debut album from My Bloody Valentine really is deserving of re-appraisal and reissue, albeit most musos out there won't have exactly forgotten it existed in the first place. Still, there are a whole lot of ears out there that were born too late and may not have discovered its wonders yet simply because they have far too much back catalogue greatness to unearth, and so this is a great opportunity to get stuck in, for want of better words.

The Irish dream pop and shoegaze pioneers do get pretty loud at times, but overall this is noise being used in a very different way to the vast majority of guitar styles before or since. Hence the record stunning critics of the day, with the sorely-missed Q magazine perhaps publishing the most apt description, from the mind of one Stuart Maconie: "The first full-length expression of this remarkable new sound: gossamer vocals and insinuating melodies glimpsed through sheets of blurred, opaque noise."

Review: Some 33 years after it first hit record stores, My Bloody Valentine's debut album still sounds undeniably fresh. Isn't Anything, which appeared on the back of two similarly ground-breaking EPs, genuinely moved guitar-based music forwards, in part by combining Kevin Shields and company's more traditional alternative rock inspirations - think Dinosaur Junior, Sonic Youth and the jangling sixties psychedelia of the Byrds - with then cutting-edge production techniques, subtle nods towards hip-hop and an impressive dedication to achieving layered, immersive sound. Sometimes loud, gnarled and intense and at other times becalmed, dreamy and otherworldly, the album remains breathlessly inspiring all these years on.

Review: My Bloody Valentine frontman Kevin Shields has talked a lot about the stress of making Loveless, the band's now iconic 1991 sophomore album. It took over two years (and trips to 20 recording studios) to make, such was Shields sharply focused desire to capture a very specific sound. As this reissue proves, his attention to detail genuinely resulted in what many critics cite as their best album - a wonderfully immersive, wide-eyed and enveloping set that fuses their fuzzy alt-rock guitars with gaseous musical textures, dreamy aural colours and painstakingly layered musical soundscapes that sound as gloriously intense and druggy as they did way back in 1991. It's an album that everyone should own - or at least all those who doubt the sonic potential of primarily guitar-based music.

Review: While it would be fair to say that My Bloody Valentine's most celebrated works are by and large albums, their EPs - and particularly the four released between 1988 and '91 - are every bit as alluring and ground-breaking. For proof, check this fine collection, which not only gathers them together but also adds rare tracks and deep cuts that have long been fan favourites (see the full, 10-minute version of 'Glider', a cacophonous but strangely addictive psychedelic soundscape, and the baggy-but-ghostly 'Instrumental No. 2'). Over the course of the two discs, it's possible to chart the pioneering band's sonic development over a three-year period in which they went from visionary alt-rockers to a band that not only defied categorization, but also played by different rules to their contemporaries.