“Tremolo”, the band’s last EP and the harbinger of a classic – SMALL CLASSICS LOST

like i said no last chapter of our noisy little narrativein 1990 controller Kevin Escudos and consequently Valentines were pressured from all sides to put a successor to Isn’t anythingand not to leave Creation in a vacuum they released the EP Gliderwhich gave them more time, tranquility AND IDEAS for the next album.

After touring promoting the album, they entered the studio again with Alan Moulder – this time without firing him (laughs) – and together they began to sew the aforementioned ideas of Shields, ideas that had already been gestated and tested by him (the ‘glide guitars ‘, the guy’s quasi-scientific obsession). Together with this technique, they began to experiment with the heavy use of samples, recording guitar riffs and playing them backwards in a loop, overlapping voices and synthesizers, incorporating beats (“Swallow” is the shoegaze version of belly dancing hahaha), in short, creating that oneiric critical mass that would explode in November of that 1991.

Tremolothe last EP by MBV and named after the homonymous pedal, was released on February 4th, nine months before Lovelessas a ‘bigger version’ of the single To here knows when, released on the same day. Greater because, in addition to the track that names the 7inch and “Swallow” (its B side), it also brings the delicious “Honey power” and the percussive “Moon song”, in addition to the ‘extensions’ called coda, in this case the already cited guitar lopps sampled and played backwards full of reverb (probably trying to invoke the satan of distortions hahaha).

In the months following the release of Tremolo there were any number of beefs between Kevin and the world – including the Valentines themselves – during the countless finishing sessions of Loveless (the disc recordings started in 1989, think…). In the end, the Gemini Shields sent everyone – with the exception of Alan Moulder – to shit, but those stories are for the next chapter of this story, about everything that involved the pregnancy and delivery of the album that changed the face of shoegaze and, for other than that, the direction of music driven by guitars.

Until then!