My Bloody Valentine reunion inches closer to reality

Without a doubt, My Bloody Valentine's short discography is one of the most fetishized in the history of indie rock. For well over a decade, music geeks have been having Loveless-soundtracked wet dreams about the fantasy of new material from Kevin Shields and his shoegazing cohorts. But like the lyrics to one of the band's songs, a new MBV album has remained elusive. Shields' eccentric sense of perfectionism has taken most of the blame; surely Loveless was too great of an albatross for him to overcome.

But according to the editors at The Daily Swarm, a new My Bloody Valentine release appears (fairly) imminent. The website evidently received an advance look at an upcoming episode of the web-only music interview series Soft Focus, in which host Ian Svenonious chats up Mr. Shields. In it, Shields confirms that he and his old bandmates have reconvened in the material, recorded new material, and could release a compilation of older works and recent recordings by the end of the year.

Here's the money shot from the interview:

"We were making a record in the 90s, around when the band broke up in 1995…and I continued with [singer] Belinda [Butcher]. We kinda made we made most of an album…. It’s going to be this ‘96/‘97 record half-finished record finished, and then a compilation of stuff we did before that in 1993–94, and a little bit of new stuff.

I pretty much know what the one that’s going to come out this year is going to sound like because its already pretty much 3/4’s done already…it sounds like what we sounded like – different but not radically different. People will go, “Yeah, it sounds like My Bloody Valentine.”

And as long as it sounds like MBV, it's worth getting excited over. There's still no official release date, of course. However, the band's website is under construction right now, and there's long been speculation that the group could make an appearance at Coachella 2008.

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