In their early years, it was easy to dismiss My Bloody Valentine as just another cutie band, anoraked, bobbed and locked into an indie obsession with a 60s ideal of perfect pop on singles like “Sunny Sundae Smile”. Then in 1987 founder member Dave Conway left and was replaced by Bilinda Butcher, who reportedly wowed the group’s Kevin Shields, Colm Ó Coisóig and Debbie Googe by singing Dolly Parton’s “Bargain Store” at her audition. By the time the four-piece erupted on stage at Creation Records’ sweaty Doing It For The Kids event at London’s Town & Country Club in summer 1988, they had arrived at a place much closer to freak-rockers like Dinosaur Jr and Mudhoney. Except that where those American groups seemed to be sliding down a slope towards sleepy oblivion or lumpen rockism, MBV were possessed of a nervy, wired energy.

Even when they were singing of soporific/narcotized dreamstates, they seemed to be conscious of the moment: when you wake, they said, you’re still in a dream. And they were no longer singing about sunny sundae smiles and strawberry wine, but sex, self-harm and clinical depression. Like the Mary Chain, they buried gorgeous melodies in veils of hiss and distortion, but unlike the Reid Bros, they didn’t have that retro rock ’n’ roll/surfadelic thing going on. It must be one of the most remarkable reinventions in rock history.

What good can come of remastering My Bloody Valentine’s albums? The sound of their Creation releases is the polar opposite of all that such reconstructions attempt to unpick. The music’s surface seethes like bees fighting for the queen: it’s a sonic miasma, a hemorrhage of peaking-light overdrive. Voices buzz deep in the mix; guitars shiver and swarm. The ‘holocaust’ at the heart of “You Made Me Realise” – title track of the first Creation EP – is the ultimate anti-guitar solo: a gaping wind-tunnel howl of mounting inertia in which the group seem to drop away completely (they famously extended this abstract void to 15 or 20 minutes on stage, to the detriment of a generation’s eardrums). Loveless was recorded in mono. By its very nature, you’re never going to get clarity on the hazed instrumental mix, but I certainly feel I can hear more of what they’re singing about on these new editions.

Unexpectedly, it’s 1988’s Isn’t Anything that comes off worst from the swab-down. Its initial strangeness now just sounds like a ramshackle tryout for what was to follow. Sure, “Lose My Breath” and “No More Sorry” are smouldering beauties, highlighting Butcher’s extinguished-torch vocals, and “I Can See It (But I Can’t Feel It)” is a weirdly dignified take on dysfunctionality. But part of the deadly effect of “Sueisfine” was knowing that they were actually singing “suicide” even if the text was buried in the maelstrom. Now you can actually hear the words.

It’s 1991’s Loveless – presented here in two versions, mastered from ‘original tape’ and ‘original ½ inch analogue tape’, if you can appreciate the difference – that holds its own as one of the great rock albums, period. Recorded over three years, largely by Shields alone, its extensive ‘glide guitar’ and curious lack of low end add up to a soundworld no one could ever hope to replicate. “Only Shallow” opens with a grunge-grind, sampled guitars baying like horns, Colm Ó Ciosóig and Debbie Googe’s rhythm section scooping out deep furrows. “To Here Knows When” remains a masterly aural hallucination, its instrumental balance utterly unprecedented in rock. The guitars are ablaze, a constant alarm note sounds throughout the song, which otherwise trundles along over a programmed rhythm. Only Fennesz has since captured this sense of flaring embers, of a music glowing brightest even as it burns itself up. “Come In Alone” could have gone on forever, Shields spilling Television-style ropes of neon solo over its repetitive coda. “Soon” spot-welded the MBV tincture to an urgent hiphop beat, pointing to a future that never arrived.

Loveless took a hefty bite out of Creation’s finances and a new deal with Island proved barren. Savour the music on these releases for what it is: a white dwarf that took three years to collapse.

Rob Young

As long as you’ve been briefed on Yorkshire local history, you know where you are with Richard Hawley. His 2009 album Truleove’s Gutter took its name from the site of an 18th century tavern whose effluent spilled into the River Don. His 2005 Coles Corner memorialized a junction outside a Sheffield Department store that was a rendez-vous for 1950s couples. Where his contemporary Jarvis Cocker has been a poet of the city’s sexual mores, Hawley’s best work has wistfully hymned Sheffield’s romantic ghosts, in a sequence of sumptuous Jim Reeves-style arrangements.

Unless Sky’s Edge is revealed to be a forgotten Don Valley beauty spot, Standing At The Sky’s Edge marks a fairly major change of tack for the songwriter-guitarist-producer. If the title invokes a location, it’s a mystical one: some thundery, Zeppelinesque Valhalla, rather than Hawley’s usual stomping ground, the steep cobbled street. Likewise the music. The opener, “She Brings The Sunlight”, kicks the doors off with a wail of noisy, electric guitars, while the title track is a layered guitar landscape, with a vocal that recalls, of all people, The Doors. Musically speaking, at least. Hawley has washed out his pomade and grown his hair long.

That’s not to say that this record is unrecognisable as the work of Richard Hawley. It is still after all a pretty sophisticated piece of retro music-making – only rather than painstakingly emulating the production values of the late 1950s and early 1960s, he’s embraced the echoes, middle eastern modality and wah-wah effects of someone hellbent on creating a heavy psychedelic guitar record. Still, psychedelic rock or not, there is a part of Richard Hawley that will always be a coal miner on a stone bridge, waiting for his girlfriend to arrive.

Duly, fans of Hawley’s rueful view of love and relationships, his fine guitar playing, and magnificent singing voice will find them all present and correct here, if displayed in unexpected ways. “Time Will Bring You Winter” is a loping wah-wah rocker, it’s true, but underneath the din of the music you’ll discover the song is about the life cycle, as told in an English vocabulary of mossy lanes and shadowy churchyards. “Down To The Woods”, the best of the album’s heavy songs, is reminiscent of “1970” by the Stooges but suggests an unpredictable outcome to what appears at first to be an English pastoral idyll.

And, although the record is bookended with heavy rock, Hawley unleashes his customary deep croonology in its excellent and very quiet middle section. Here, we find Hawley writing magnificently in a trio of songs which seem to be about how love is meant to be, and how it is really, for good and bad. “Seek It” juxtaposes a charming, slightly jaunty tune with a fabulously dry lyric – “I had a dream and you were in it/We got naked/Can’t remember what happened next/It was weird” – and features Hawley’s fabulously restrained playing. “Don’t Stare At The Sun” could be a Chemical Brothers title, but is ultimately all about how the everyday consolations of family are more important than waiting for cosmic revelations. “The Wood Collier’s Grave”, the only song you will hear this year to detail the thoughts from beyond the grave of a charcoal burner’s apprentice, is a tender folk ballad.

So even when Standing… returns to its heavy mode in its last two numbers, the subject matter remains very much Hawley’s. Final track “Before” is the album’s mode in a nutshell, an attempt to reconcile his two sides, rocker and crooner; stargazer and earth-dweller. In a song part gentle U2 ballad, part Oasis guitar anthem, he suggests that for all the head-turning things the universe can offer, the realities of a familiar relationship and shared history are the things that really matter.

The more Richard Hawley changes, evidently, the more he stays the same. Head from time to time in the clouds. Feet still very much on the ground.

John Robinson

Q&A

This is a heavy, psychedelic-sounding kind of record.

I don’t like the word psychedelic because it implies flowers and lollipops, and there’s none of that on this record at all. It’s quite dark, you know.

In what way?

I think I started writing when the Tories got in – it influenced a lot of the first song which was “Down In The Woods”. They were trying to sell off the forest land, and that had me really fucking outraged. ((i)Sheffield guitarist(i))Tim McCall’s passing was a catalyst for a lot of musical activity. He died walking upstairs carrying a baby blanket and a cup of tea – he tripped on his shoelace and broke his neck. It’s done all of our heads in. He was a fantastic guy, lovely bloke.

There are some intimate, family moments like “Don’t Stare At The Sun”.

I was left responsible for one of my children after quite a heavy night on hallucinogenic drugs. If anybody from the NSPCC is reading this I should say I was completely compos mentis – but things were still…whizzing and popping. How vividly you see everything on acid – the intense happiness of that was the beginning of the song.

So are you going to grow your hair now?

I can reliably assure you that when you called up before I couldn’t pick the phone up because I had grease in me hands, doing me quiff.

INTERVIEW: JOHN ROBINSON

Josh Tillman had had enough. Enough of Seattle, enough of his alter-ego J Tillman (the name under which he released a number of solo albums), enough of his relationship, enough even of Fleet Foxes, the band he’d drummed with since 2008. So he “blew everything up”, filled his van with hallucinogenic mushrooms and headed for California, where he moved into a shack in Laurel Canyon and began writing a novel.

That novel unleashed a narrative voice that has now spawned an album, Fear Fun, released under the pseudonym Father John Misty and packed with sardonic, self-effacing songs that recall the finest traditions of harmony-soaked West Coast folk-and-country-influenced rock ‘n’ roll. It’s produced by Jonathan Wilson, who played on many of the songs, and is steeped in Wilson’s Laurel Canyon vibe.

“Look out Hollywood here I come,” sings Tillman on the lush, string-laden opening song “Funtimes In Babylon”, the first of many references to Hollywood that help give Fear Fun a sure sense of location. It’s also the first sign of Tillman’s humour, which he has never revealed in song before and is the key to Fear Fun’s vibe. The album was born in a ‘black dog’ of depression, but there’s nothing downbeat about the wit and warmth he exudes on the disco-country, “Nancy From Now On” and the neo-shoegazing morbid humour of “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”.

Despite Tillman’s adoption of the Father John Misty pseudonym, Fear Fun is a very personal album and its centrepiece is “I’m Writing A Novel”, a road song that relates the story behind the making of the album to a Nicky Hopkins boogie reminiscent of “The Ballad Of John And Yoko” and the Mamas And The Papas “Creeque Alley”. It’s the perfect melody for a rollicking narrative that includes the mocking refrain “I’m writing a novel because it’s never been done before” and ends in the plastic purgatory of Laurel Canyon, where “I’m surrounded on all sides, by people writing novels and living on amusement rides”. (Tilllman’s own novel, incidentally, is published in its entirety on two posters that come with the album.)

Next comes the hymnal, self-explanatory “O I Long To Feel Your Arms Around Me”, which sounds like a slowed-down “Karma Chameleon”, before the celebratory, psychedelic “Misty’s Nightmares 1 & 2”. “I’m going to take my life,” he sighs, “I’m going to take my life back one day.” There’s no wallowing in self-pity here, instead a determined instinct for self-preservation. After the self-promoting carnival strum of “Only Son Of The Ladiesman” – perhaps the best showcase of Tillman’s gorgeous voice – and the whimsical, Sgt Pepper-like “This is Sally Hatchet”, complete with deranged sitar, we hit the luscious home straight.

“Well, You Can Do It Without Me” is enigmatic, slinky mid-70s AM rock that brings together Stealer’s Wheel and Waylon Jennings – an avowed hero of Tillman’s – with a whistling chorus that sounds like Roger Miller’s 1973 soundtrack for “Robin Hood” or The First Edition’s “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In”). It’s partly about the record industry, as is “Now I’m Learning To Love The War”, a sweet ballad about the reality of producing art on which he asks (himself?) to ‘try not to think so much about, the truly staggering amount, of all that it takes to make a record’.

Penultimate track “Tee Pees 1-12” is an old-fashioned country hoe-down about a very Californian courtship (“We went to get some work done, so our faces finally matched, the doctor took one look at me, and took a skin draft out of my ass”), before this supremely confident album closes with the lighters-aloft George Harrison-channelling anthem “Everyman Needs A Companion”. “I never liked the name Joshua, and I got tired of J,” he confesses. So Father John Misty it is, and it sounds like he’s here to stay.

Peter Watts

Q&A

Who is Father John Misty?

He’s nobody. I like mischief and I saw this very elegant gag that after making seven or eight records under my own name that say little to nothing about myself, I could write really explicitly about myself and call it whatever I wanted.

How does it differ from your previous work?

Before I even joined Fleet Foxes I was on auto-pilot. I’d turned this thing I love into a stagnant obligatory exercise. Music had been about fear – ‘time to get into the temple of fear, time to quake and mourn and bleat and bleed’ – and I’d always been conflicted about my ability to make people laugh. I was sitting naked in a tree in Big Sur when I had this ‘a-ha’ moment and knew exactly what I had to do: ‘Sing, like you talk, idiot’. Part of this album is reclaiming the eight-year-old me before he was distorted by religion, convention and institutions.

What are the musical influences?

I like musical ideas that are devoid of pretence and songs that have ideas. The music is more or less a template, but it’s got a living, breathing human at the core. Country, blues and rock and roll are the DNA of the American musical tradition and I feel a thread of continuity with that time in American culture.

INTERVIEW: PETER WATTS