Soon

My Bloody Valentine made the four piece indie guitar band sound like something else entirely with their 1988 album Isn't Anything. There were other bands in a similar area- Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth for two- but they don't really sound like what Kevin Shields, Colm O' Ciosoig, Belinda Butcher and Debbie Googe were doing.  MBV's 1990 single (and a year later Loveless album closer) Soon is another thing again.

Soon

Shields found a new way of playing and most people assumed it involved tons of pedals but apparently not. Shields mainly just used open strings and tunings and the tremelo bar. In the studio (or multiple studios in the case of Loveless) Shields sent his guitar through one amp, his and Belinda's vocals split through different amps and mics and made a huge sound. The drums on Soon sound sampled, played by Colm but in pieces and then sampled to make drum tracks. Shields got into sampling while recording Loveless but says he was mainly sampling the guitars, feedback and distortion mostly, while the vocals were often done early in the morning after being up all night recording. In 2007 Shields said that what you can hear on much of Loveless is 'the sound of the guitar bending. What you hear is the sound between sound.'

Soon is a stunning song. The video, a little dated now perhaps, manages to do it some kind of justice, a low budget hazy and washed out approximation of what Soon sounds like.