Tip! Ep’s 1988–1991 and rare tracks is the missing spine of the My Bloody Valentine story, the moment‑by‑moment record of how a noisy indie band mutated into the group that would make Loveless. Compiled and remastered by Kevin Shields, the collection gathers the four pivotal Creation‑era EPs – You Made Me Realise and Feed Me With Your Kiss (both 1988), Glider (1990) and Tremolo (1991) – alongside a run of instrumentals, remixes, flexi‑only cuts and previously unreleased songs. Heard together, they trace a restless, incremental shift: from serrated, hardcore‑kissed fuzz to the strange, suspended, pitch‑bent world that would define shoegaze for decades.
The first stretch of the compilation captures the band in a state of volatile bloom. You Made Me Realise and Feed Me With Your Kiss still move like rock songs – riffs, choruses, a clear attack – but everything already feels slightly wrong in the best way: guitars tuned into uneasy keys, drums pushing against the grain of the vocal melodies, a sense that the mix is being driven into intentional overload. Shields’ and Bilinda Butcher’s voices slip into the texture rather than sitting on top of it, turning lyrics into another strand of noise. Even at their most direct, the songs sound like they’re being played through a waking dream, the edges frayed, the centre strangely soft.
With Glider and Tremolo, the centre of gravity tilts decisively. “Soon” arrives as the hinge‑point: a looping, dance‑inflected drum pattern, submerged vocals and a guitar tone that feels less like distortion and more like molten light, hinting at both club music and migraine. Across these later EPs you can hear the band abandoning verse‑chorus habits in favour of drift and accumulation. Chords smear into each other, tremolo and glide guitar turns pitch into a liquid medium, and songs often feel like they’re built from a single, obsessive gesture examined from different angles. Tracks like “To Here Knows When”, “Swallow”, “Honey Power” and “Moon Song” are less compositions in the traditional sense than weather systems: thick, enveloping, always on the verge of either eruption or disappearance.
The “rare tracks” deepen the picture rather than acting as simple bonuses. The two “Instrumental” cuts, originally given away on a 7" with Isn’t Anything, offer early glimpses of MBV as almost pure texture: drum machines, loops and submerged melody pointing toward sample‑based and club‑aware futures. The full‑length “Glider” remix stretches recognisable elements into a ten‑minute slow‑motion smear, turning rock motif into proto‑ambient drift. Flexi‑only pieces like “Sugar” and unreleased songs such as “Angel”, “Good For You” or “How Do You Do It” show the band testing out parallel paths – poppier, rawer, stranger – that feed back into the mainline records in subtle ways. Together, these outliers confirm that the official EPs were just the visible part of a much larger, constantly mutating process.
Remastered from the original tapes, the collection gives new definition to material that many listeners first encountered in battered, hiss‑blurred form. The low end hits harder, the mid‑range fog feels more intentional than ever, and small details – a stray harmony, a drum ghost note, a moment where the guitars briefly clear to reveal the song’s skeleton – come into focus without puncturing the music’s famous opacity. Packaged as a double CD and digital release, ep’s 1988–1991 and rare tracks stands alongside Isn’t Anything and Loveless as essential listening: the sound of a band working out, EP by EP, how to bend rock into something weightless, disorienting and oddly tender, and in the process drawing a map that countless others would follow.
