Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Drowned in Sound	9/10
Entertainment Weekly	A−
Mojo
MSN Music	A−
Pitchfork Media	10/10
Q
The Rolling Stone Album Guide

Isn't Anything is the debut full-length studio album by My Bloody Valentine, released on 21 November 1988 on Creation Records. The album's innovative instrumental and production techniques consolidated the experimentation of the group's preceding EPs, and would make it a pioneering work of shoegazing.

After the band's original vocalist Dave Conway left in 1987, to be replaced by Bilinda Butcher, the band continued for a while in their previous noisy indie-pop style before Kevin Shields returned to their avant-garde roots, and began to explore the possibilities offered by the studio facilities available after signing to Creation Records in 1988. The first fruit of this experimentation was the single/EP "You Made Me Realise", released in July 1988, with Isn't Anything following later that year. "Kevin gave me 'You Made Me Realise', which was supposed to be a track on their first EP for us," recalled Creation head Alan McGee. "I went, That's the single! He was shocked, cos they'd only done the track as a joke. Then they did stuff for their album, and I said, Go for more of the weirder stuff. So they went back and did stuff like 'Soft as Snow'. Those are the only suggestions I've ever given them."

Most of the album was recorded in a studio in Wales. While recording the album over a period of two weeks, the band got by on about two hours sleep a night. Bilinda Butcher described the effect of this: "Often, when we do the vocals, it's 7:30 in the morning: I've usually fallen asleep and have to be woken up to sing. Maybe that's why it's languorous. I'm usually trying to remember what I've been dreaming about when I'm singing."

Taylor Parkes of The Quietus described the album as "livid, lurid and lucid, it's the shattering racket of the moment, an audio snapshot of the overwhelmed senses, a noise like nothing you've ever heard, but everything you've ever felt."Q's Stuart Maconie observed that "Isn't Anything was the first full-length expression of this remarkable new sound: gossamer vocals and insinuating melodies glimpsed through sheets of blurred, opaque noise."Dave Thompson, in his book Alternative Rock, described the album's sound as "dry ice-piercingly intense guitar drones and hefty nods to miasmic hardcore soup, oozing a contrary trance-spun drone. Noise becomes beauty as feedback is layered over vocals over feedback ad infinitum". Anthony Carew of About.com described its style as "atonal, desconstructed, free-noise guitar playing" and noted that it had an "ethereal, spectral quality that radically reconfigured the predominant paradigms of rock'n'roll". "Several Girls Galore" has been described as "a cubist take on The Jesus and Mary Chain".

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Wikipedia