1. 1. "To Here Knows When"
Album: Loveless
“To Here Knows When” is My Bloody Valentine’s best song because it is their broadest. The disparate elements that come together to form its sound and structure hail from the far reaches of both the rock music vocabulary and Kevin Shields’ known creative capacity. The resulting song spans quite a landscape of thematic possibilities. Peer into “To Here Knows When” and, much like someone recognizing the common shapes of their own world in the clouds of a spring sky, you will see a lot of shoegaze’s thematic standards: innocence, pain, longing, love, and many others. The song, however, seems to encompass these feelings inside something much larger, but no less discretely shaped.
The song’s rhythmic base is almost laughably puny: a tambourine shakes, a drum kit putters alone, and one of Loveless’ signature loops warbles softly, yet insistently. In contrast, the guitars hum with a seemingly random yet distinctively circular motion, periodically overtaking the rhythm section completely, filling the track with painfully astringent noise. The song’s chord changes are formulated with devastating impact in mind: towards the end, a change can turn the track from ear-splitting whine to a hollow, harmonic scrape. It’s an experience that is disorienting to the point of desperation. The song tosses you from the painful squeeze of one hand to the other, with only the consolation of Bilinda Butcher’s smooth and swooping vocals as familiar comfort.
And yet, as the song moves towards sonic oblivion, it maintains a steady upward movement: the cutting guitars and Bilinda’s reserved chorus are always grasping skyward. Combined, the song’s process paints a vivid and unsweetened portrait of rebirth, washing the listener in a bath of painfully corrosive acid as the song rises towards heavenly joy. It’s a romantic, yet unflinchingly tactless vision, projected forth by the strange juxtaposition of sonic oddities. “To Here Knows When” is Kevin Shields’ masterpiece, not necessarily because it is his most unique and unprecedented, but because it proves most conclusively that he can recognize, isolate, and elongate the sonic relationships that resonate most fully with their counterparts in the pain-filled life.
