My Bloody Valentine

First arriving in 1988, the debut album from My Bloody Valentine really is deserving of re-appraisal and reissue, albeit most musos out there won't have exactly forgotten it existed in the first place. Still, there are a whole lot of ears out there that were born too late and may not have discovered its wonders yet simply because they have far too much back catalogue greatness to unearth, and so this is a great opportunity to get stuck in, for want of better words.

The Irish dream pop and shoegaze pioneers do get pretty loud at times, but overall this is noise being used in a very different way to the vast majority of guitar styles before or since. Hence the record stunning critics of the day, with the sorely-missed Q magazine perhaps publishing the most apt description, from the mind of one Stuart Maconie: "The first full-length expression of this remarkable new sound: gossamer vocals and insinuating melodies glimpsed through sheets of blurred, opaque noise."