I can actually say that I know whereof he speaks. I witnessed the song played live, on a frigid New York night, at a venue no longer there in the west 20s. The gig also featured Screaming Trees and Dinosaur Jr. In retrospect, I’m surprised I can still hear at all. The volume of the show was plenty loud throughout, but toward the end of MBV’s set, the band unleashed a sustained segment of sheer, shrieking, earsplitting noise, six or eight minutes’ worth, that was shocking even to a room full of pretty jaded NYC listeners. Coming at the end of the stutter-step phrase before the title words are sung, the squall of noise constituted a provocative gesture far beyond anything that could be done by flipping the bird or acting snotty. It was almost frightening. Scores of people headed out to the lobby until it stopped, and I might have been one of them. What McGonigal says is that halfway through this assault, something weird would happen: it started to sound like this beautiful otherworldly music you’d never heard before. Perhaps it was only the sound that our ear cells make when they die, but he theorizes that this otherworldly noise became the inspiration for the never-to-be duplicated sounds of Loveless, the sound Shields pursued with obsessive deliberateness on a record that he did virtually everything on.

The version that leads off the EP features a very small slice of “the noise,” so you just have to imagine it 100 times louder and about seven minutes longer. It’s still an audacious head-banger. Next comes the aforementioned “Slow,” a big fat sigh of sex, with a bass as tumescent as Missy Elliott’s badunka-dunk dunk. The guitars have a bit of the smeared sound that the Queens-born (you read that right) Shields exploited fully on Loveless. Side 2 of this vinyl fetish object features three songs. Perhaps the band’s most radio-ready pop song, “Thorn” is a giddy delight, featuring an almost Byrdsian guitar sound and punctuated by some lovely “ooohs.” The guitars are searing but still a touch jangly, and the melody is a real grabber. In heaven, this is what you hear when you turn on the radio. Things slow down and get a bit introspective with “Cigarette in Your Bed” featuring Blinda Butcher’s haunting solo vocals, backed by waves of controlled chaos that ebbs and flows in a way that seems to presage the watery quality of the sound yet to come. Even though the band did not dabble much in the drugs for which their music seems tailor-made, this one feels like heroin to me. Still, dig those drum fills, and the way the guitars seem to threaten to get huge, only to back down beneath the ennui-ridden sound of Blinda’s “doot-doot-doot” melody. And then, a stunning, killer final track, “Drive it All Over Me,” a sublime mix of shimmering chords and melodic thrash. “Get in your car and drive it all over me.” Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Note: the second EP, Feed Me with Your Kiss, released later that same year, is heavier and denser, and will be the subject of an upcoming column. Hey world, this is your bloody valentine, don’t let this one get away.

Ed. note: Normally, we would draw the line against posting an entire EP, let alone a full album. Taking the wind out of a band's potential revenue like that is too much. During the recent L'Affair d'Oink we were of the mind that no site that blatantly illegal could escape notice forever. The only argument for its existence that held any water whatsoever was that, in this digital age, there is no real reason for treasured musical artifacts to fall out of print. (Not that an out of print record appreciation society was Oink's main purpose, that being a pipeline to the newest leaked goods.) Now, I can understand a record label sitting on curios from the vaults whose sales aren't likely to make up prohibitive physical production costs, but what does it cost them to throw something up on iTunes? And if that logic counts for any number of one off 45s and post-punk also-rans, it goes triple for something like My Bloody Valentine's You Made Me Realise. Is there any reason for these songs to be held from interested listeners? We can fret that the blog world has decreased the value of music, but I think we can all also agree that the Amazon asking price for a milestone 5 song EP should not be in the 74 to 90 dollar range? The cost of discovery should never be that prohibitive. So here, for a while at least, is a .zip file of the EP in question, for all to hear in preparation for the impending MBV reunion. If you're a record exec. fuming because we're blowing up the spot of your imminent re-release, let us know. -JK