“Touch your head, then your hair/Softer, softer everywhere/Fingertips are burning/Can I touch you there?” Shields sings. But for all its bullish experimentation, there rema ins a lyrical clarity on Isn’t Anything that would become all but obscured on the album’s more celebrated successor. “Soft as Snow (But Warm Inside)” is effectively the test run for Loveless ’ sonic shape-shifting, with Shields contorting the band’s squall into unrecognizable forms, like someone just discovering that they can bend their elbow backwards. of the world, frontman Kev in Shields was also starting to realize that guitar noise was more a means than an end. While in-the-red blowouts like “Feed Me With Your Kiss” saw them keeping fuzz-pedal pace with the Dinosaur Jrs. But its relatively underrated predecessor is also a fascinating listen, capturing the Irish quartet in an exciting stage of metamorphosis before they got swallowed up by forces bigger than themselves. –Ryan DombalĮven as they’ve resurfaced this decade, My Bloody Valentine can still feel like a myth more than a proper band thanks to the legend surrounding their second album, 1991’s Loveless. And yet, for all of its eccentricities and soothsaying, The Sensual World is grounded in a common humanity that knows no specific decade, origin, or sound. The connective themes also extend to the album’s music: This must be the only LP ever to combine Irish bagpipes with Bulgarian folk singing and screeching guitar solos by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. Such longing for connection and bridging of realms can be felt throughout The Sensual World: The title track is a languorous sex jam that has Bush breathing lust into the Molly Bloom character from James Joyce’s Ulysses “The Fog” finds the then-31-year-old singer navigating the space separating childhood memories and adult responsibilities “This Woman’s Work” is an iconic tearjerker about a husband waiting for his wife to emerge from the delivery room, a lifetime’s worth of hope and regret flooding his brain. “I bring you love and deeper understanding.” The song is both eerie and eerily prescient, but it is not judgmental. “Hello, I know that you’re unhappy,” she sings, voicing the proto-Siri app. On “Deeper Understanding,” she offers a cautionary tale of a lost soul who takes solace in their pixelated screen, trading in reality for a siren-like computer program. Even way back in 1989-when an Apple laptop weighed 16 pounds and cost $7,300- Kate Bush realized how computers would upend all of our lives.
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