Pitchfork

Kevin Shields did a live online interview on AOL in February 1997. The obvious question was asked first: When can we hear some new material? Shields responded, "Definitely sometime this year or I'm dead," and then later, "I really am dead if I don't get my record out this year." Six and a half years after that interview there's still no follow-up to the landmark Loveless, but Shields is very much alive, working with Primal Scream and doing the occasional remix. He recently admitted that the pressure of following what many consider to be a perfect record is what did him in. He couldn't bear to put the My Bloody Valentine name on something inferior to Loveless, and so he kept his tapes in the vault. There was no next chapter and probably never will be; life continues.

Perhaps the enormous weight Kevin Shields has been living under has been lifted. My Bloody Valentine exists only as history and now, on the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, Shields gives his own name a try. Lost in Translation contains four new Shields tracks, his first original work in more than a decade, and though there are eleven other songs here, the Shields material is the drawing card.

He first appears on the second track, "City Girl", his lone new vocal song. On first listen it sounds like a demo of a pre-Loveless track, possibly from the You Made Me Realise era. It's mid-tempo, with an unusual repeating melody and a two-note chorus. The guitar is simple and rough, a bit garage-rock, bouncing over characteristically buried drums that seem an afterthought. This is Kevin Shields the pop songwriter, the guy with a collection of rare Beatles bootlegs who puts on "Strawberry Fields" when he's feeling down. The sound of the thing could be anybody-- no exploration on that front-- but the melody and voice are familiar and welcome.

The next two Shields tracks are pretty instrumentals that feel more like film cues (which they are) than proper songs. "Goodbye" has a wispy synth texture and a vaguely Celtic bent, and sounds somewhat Eno-esque but more emotionally manipulative, like it must play in a scene geared to leave a lump in your throat. The faint glide guitar textures gently snaking through the drone offer evidence of its maker, but the signature is subtle. Then there's the 98-second "Ikebana", which consists of lightly plucked electric guitar over gentle synth washes. It's not boring, exactly, just nondescript. If you Invisible Jukeboxed me, I might guess I might guess Mark Knopfler's soundtrack to The Princess Bride.

Finally, there's the odd "Are You Awake?" The most sonically interesting of Shields' tracks, "Are You Awake?" combines the steady pulse of a cheap Casio drum machine with some echoing, dubby guitar effects. It reminds a little of pre-Autobahn Kraftwerk and the surprising motorik rhythm combines wonderfully with his gauzy guitar texture, but it's painfully short at a minute and a half. I get the sense that Shields is on the verge of tapping into something deeper here, some combination of his guitar depth and cheap instrumental overlays, but "Are You Awake?" doesn't give much to go on.

As to the rest of the soundtrack, Shields' presence extends beyond his new songs. Maybe I'm just filling in blanks, but aspects of the sound he perfected can be felt throughout. There's a My Bloody Valentine track ("Sometimes"), a My Bloody Valentine forbear (Jesus and Mary Chain's "Just Like Honey" closes), and an unexpectedly great My Bloody Valentine impression (Death in Vegas' ethereal "Girls"). Squarepusher's short ambient ditty "Tommib" even seems vaguely connected somehow.

Other highlights include Air's mostly acoustic (guitar and piano) "Alone in Kyoto", which echoes the competent mood music of their recent collaboration with Italian author Alessandro Baricco (sans the narration), and Kaze Wo Atsumete's "Happy End", which sounds like a fine Aluminum Group AM radio tribute sung in Japanese. There are odd selections (Phoenix's "Too Young" sounds like an 80s power-pop track that might have soundtracked a Michael J. Fox flick), but for the most part, the tracks hang together and flow relatively well, orbiting the shimmering dreampop mass that serves as the record's unstated inspiration. The man at the center of that universe sounds unsteady, but a tentative first step back into the songwriting world is better than nothing. Here's hoping he makes it a bit further next time.