My Bloody Valentine’s Feed Me With Your Kiss is a slightly unusual sort of record, in that it’s a sweetly sung love song with lyrics murmured over a raging cascade of noise like a brutal and sustained military bombardment.
Within the cacophony, there’s a duet between Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher, who both seem oblivious to the chaos around them:
Oh, come lie down close to me
Do what you dare, oh I don’t care
I will get what I can see I’ll crawl over there
‘Cause things the way they are
I guess you might go real far
So feed me with your kiss
Spread me like appeal to you
I do what I do, I do what I will do
Crave, your kiss will set you free
I’ll do what I should, I’ll do what I should
As the singer, song writer and main creative behind My Bloody Valentine, Kevin Shields is rightly hailed as the genius element of the band, with Bilinda Butcher, as singer/guitarist a little way behind. But this song really demonstrates the contribution of the MBV rhythm section, underpinned as it is by the incredible speed and precision of Colm Ó Cíosóig’s drumming and the ecstatically wrought, booming bassline of Debbie Googe. The devastating power they bring to this track is what truly elevates it.
Feed Me With Your Kiss was released in EP format in October 1988 as the lead single from My Bloody Valentine’s classic album Isn’t Anything, which came out the following month.
Isn’t Anything inspired thousands of imitators and My Bloody Valentine are often credited/blamed for being the catalyst behind the shoegaze genre which peaked in the early-nineties. None of the shoegaze bands ever came close to the artistic heights that My Bloody Valentine achieved though. These bands had all the effects pedals and they could murmur, but they lacked the other crucial elements set by the MBV template – the originality, the power and the genius.
