I don’t quite know how this has happened, but according to my last.fm profile, My Bloody Valentine currently lie somewhere outside my top 500 most listened to artists. While I’ve never professed great love for the band, I’m into shoegazing enough that earlier this year I dedicated a playlist to it, and New You even brings MBV’s number of appearances on this blog to three.

And yet… and yet… it turns out I very rarely think to myself that what I would really like to listen to right now is a gigantic wall of guitars squalling and screaming at me, while the vocalist murmurs indeterminate nothings somewhere in the middle ground. I even cynically decided that last year’s m b v would be a crushing disappointment to all the hardcore Kevin Shields fans who’d been waiting twenty years for a proper follow-up to Loveless, before being proved utterly wrong by a stream of positive reviews and very warm fan-feedback.

And yet… and yet… it still says something about my reluctance to leap on that particular bandwagon that the My Bloody Valentine song I’ve chosen to kick off this month’s playlist of lost treasures is the track from m b v that perhaps least matches the My Bloody Valentine stereotype: the guitars vibrate and pulse serenely, punctuated by simple bass notes, creating a warm embrace that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a band that strongly advises gig-goers to wear earplugs or suffer the consequences.