Sex Post Facto: EP's That Your Sister Listened to While Sexually Experimenting
By Nathan Fisher
A&F Editor

My Bloody Valentine
Geek
Fever
1985

My Bloody Valentine claimed that they were heavily influenced by hip hop's redefinition of rhythm yet the Geek EP's liner notes implore the listener to turn the treble way, way up. I will always have a place in my heart for when Biggie says "your crew run, run, run / your crew run, run" and makes that little running motion with his fingers on the video for "Hypnotize," but after I hear Ready To Die I don't exactly become insanely desperate for sex. After listening to Geek, I bite down on my lip as my eyes dart hungrily about whatever room I'm in. Thankfully, I'm always by myself in the KSPC studio or else alone in my room, so temptation doesn't often get the better of me.

I got into Geek eighteen years after it came out. It warms my heart that this EP is eighteen years old and finally legal, in fact. It warms my heart that My Bloody Valentine was out there in 1985, kicking ass for the forces of good in the middle of a decade riddled with the rapid deterioration of both popular music and the American Left. But My Bloody Valentine was not American-they didn't even like America that much, especially how its rapidly deteriorating Left insisted that everything anyone did was "postmodern." My Bloody Valentine said they were from Dublin, Ireland. Like Jimi Hendrix, however, My Bloody Valentine was probably from space.

An excerpt from an August, 1992 interview with lead singer Kevin Shields for Hype pretty much sums up the incredibleness of this band:

Hype: "What about your live presentation? It was impossible to tell when you were singing tonight-the vocal mikes may not have been working-and the lights were often completely blinding, so we couldn't see you. Also your hair completely covered your face. Is that the way you're most comfortable performing?"

Shields: "It's different every night, sometimes it's not as blinding. But all that kind of forces people to sort of not rely on... being able to be comfortable. It makes people aware of the fact that when they can see us they're being allowed to, you know what I mean? We're kind of controlling everyone's environment by the volume and the lights."

Geek came before Bilinda Butcher joined the band. Geek came before Kevin Shields was (briefly) the king of rock and roll. Geek came before nineteen-eighty eight's bruised, bruising and thoroughly slutty full-length Isn't Anything redefined what the fringes of pop could sound like and started a generation of Xers staring at their feet, unwilling (or afraid) to move at all. Geek came out before the band subsequently dropped $500,000 and two years in the studio on Loveless, an album that gets thrown around as the best album of the nineties probably because no one will ever be able to figure it out exactly why it's so fucking sexy.

But you can actually hear the lyrics on Geek. While later My Bloody Valentine completely devours the meat, heart and soul of its four-minute songs and leaves behind a tied-up, disemboweled, ghost of a pop album, Geek is simply four pop-rock gems: meat, heart and soul survive, but in hindsight you can kinda tell they're about to be sentenced to death. The EP sounds to me like the band is floating a few inches off the stage and, I tell you, it is one of the few recordings that has ever made me want to dance. The album touches on "haunt[ing] your nightmare," "giv[ing] the devil his due," having "no place to go," and what life is like when there is "no tomorrow." But this is not a dark EP. Indeed, it is as light as a feather-almost a ghost, as it were.

The first track is "No Place to Go" and if you've ever felt like you've had no place to go, you will melt when Kevin Shields sings to you: "Don't you walk the streets alone / I want to take you home / You got no place to go." His voice is pretty amazing, and Geek almost makes you wish that the vocals weren't so soft that they're indecipherable on MBV's later offerings. But then you realize that you've fetishized the vocals and they really don't matter. Then you thank Kevin Shields, you thank him for reminding you that the world can be sexy all over again.

The other three songs, "Moonlight," "Love Machine," and "The Sandman Never Sleeps," are all pretty similar, but have their own subtle variations on the same driving pop thematic. "The Sandman Never Sleeps" and its addictive bass drum is my current favorite, but that might well change. After I listen to this EP, no matter how mad I am at the government or disillusioned I am about my ineffective sex life, I am temporarily satiated and pleasantly hollowed out, as if I had just had sex with a ghost.