Fatter Hipper wrote:

QUOTE:
I don't get this 'decade full of copyist' line. Who are these copyists? Ride and Chapterhouse have hardly been ubiquitous and of the post-rockers only a couple of songs off Mogwai's debut pay much debt to MBV.

I don't know about a decade of it (because I simply don't listen to enough - or varied enough - music) but I know for sure that Ulrich Schnauss (who I like) has almost become just an MBV tribute act on his last album. 'A Strangely Isolated Place' was a nice 'MBV-lite' style pop album, but 'Goodbye' is just a wash of noise in places.

(edit: I have to wonder if Gas (aka Wolfgang Voigt) was influenced by them, with his hazy sound.

You also have to look at some of the bands on the 'shoegaze revival' scene, as witnessed at the Sonic Cathedral events, such as ILikeTrains. Maybe even Sigur Ros.)

Sigur Ros sound more and more like Slowdive.

Nuno Gomes Loves Lyra wrote:

QUOTE:
Sigur Ros sound more and more like Slowdive.

Precisely. And from there we get to Lali Puna and Isan, who take the MBV wall of sound and skilfully invert it, so it's nearer to a wall of silence.

On a different tack, having not seen MBV before, I was seriously impressed at how tight (and how powerful) the 'rhythm section' was. If you get any slackness in the rhythm section in that style of music, it can easily sound like sub-sixth-form dross, but they (Debbie Googe and Colm O'Ciosoig) were brilliant, I thought. He, in particular, must have been knackered after just the first night, let alone a whole tour!

Oh it goes way beyond the shoegaze lot. That wall-of-sound guitar was a blueprint for a pile of the most successful rock music of the last 15 or so years. Oasis, Coldplay, Snow Patrol and all that lot would sound radically different without it. Even if it is a third hand influence for at least one of those acts.

Tubby Isaacs wrote:

QUOTE:
Is there any reason why it has to be so loud?

Yeah, I got a much better sense of them as a band than I had from the records. Belied the vacuum-filling reputation of Shields as the mad, show-running auteur quite nicely.

Taylor recently made the excellent point that their legacy may be (unfortunately but, considering the imaginations of most guitar bands, perhaps inevitably) the tendency in the likes of Oasis to paper the cracks in their rudimentary output with a wall of loud guitars. [edit: Venga beat me to it.]

Now, those metaphors may be brutally mixed, but I did just invent "wallpaper rock" so leave me alone.

SR - fair enough, but I thought it was closer to the impossible experience of standing inside a giant jet engine and I loved every minute.

re actual noise levels, someone took a look at the mixing desk and reported 130 decibels.

iLiKETRAiNS sound nothing like MBV. Their guitar sound is crystalline and icy, not hazy and queasy. They occasionally stomp on the distortion pedal for effect, but MBV's not about simple quiet/loud dynamics.

Sigur Ros certainly are more Slowdive, though I love the second and now loathe the first. YES, I LOVE SLOWDIVE. I listen to them more than MBV (though I accept that MBV are superior).

130 db would be stupidly loud in the open air. In a closed room, it's fucking lethal.

At the risk of sounding like the least rock and roll person in history, I'm surprised there isn't a law against that.

QUOTE:
You say that, but there's a bit in one of Camus' novels about a guy who's trapped inside a hollowed-out tree for years, only ever seeing the same circle of sky. After a while his eyes become attuned to detecting the slightest fluctuations in that small circle, which would be invisible to the rest of us. I wonder whether, in musical terms, you're the guy in the tree.

If you're trying to say my musical taste is narrow then I think you'd be surprised.

Bands might try and sound like MBV- I dunno- but Loveless is so out there in a world of its own there's nothing that sounds anything like it. Some of my band's early stuff was influenced by MBV but we had 4 hours in the studio and some cheap Boss pedals. I still think the songs in question are effective, but they sound nothing like MBV. And Ulrich Schnauss' last album sounds more like Enya than MBV.

Primal Scream's XTRMNTR is very MBV in places, but that's largely because Kevin Shields was heavily involved.

evilC wrote:

QUOTE:
On a different tack, having not seen MBV before, I was seriously impressed at how tight (and how powerful) the 'rhythm section' was. If you get any slackness in the rhythm section in that style of music, it can easily sound like sub-sixth-form dross, but they (Debbie Googe and Colm O'Ciosoig) were brilliant, I thought. He, in particular, must have been knackered after just the first night, let alone a whole tour!

Hah, they fucked up "When You Wake You're Still In A Dream". They all stood around for a bit and looked at each other, not knowing what to do.

Fatter Hipper wrote:

QUOTE:

QUOTE:
You say that, but there's a bit in one of Camus' novels about a guy who's trapped inside a hollowed-out tree for years, only ever seeing the same circle of sky. After a while his eyes become attuned to detecting the slightest fluctuations in that small circle, which would be invisible to the rest of us. I wonder whether, in musical terms, you're the guy in the tree.

If you're trying to say my musical taste is narrow then I think you'd be surprised.

Bands might try and sound like MBV- I dunno- but Loveless is so out there in a world of its own there's nothing that sounds anything like it. Some of my band's early stuff was influenced by MBV but we had 4 hours in the studio and some cheap Boss pedals. I still think the songs in question are effective, but they sound nothing like MBV. And Ulrich Schnauss' last album sounds more like Enya than MBV.

Primal Scream's XTRMNTR is very MBV in places, but that's largely because Kevin Shields was heavily involved.

I'm not saying your musical taste is narrow as such, but I am saying that you're deeply immersed in the whole post-rock/Wire magazine/ATP avant-noise thing, to the extent that tiny differences within it may seem massive from where you're standing, whereas to the rest of us it's pretty clear that a massive chunk of those bands are hugely indebted to MBV.

All day on 40% there's a thread about Camus and MBV and now here, this is good stuff.