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Picture the scene...
The CD pressing plant has just taken delivery of a couple of albums. My Bloody Valentines' long awaited follow-up to Loveless and some belated 90s Chill Out compilation. Unfortunately, there's a new member of staff at the plant that day, his supervisor has taken a sickie and he's left on his own. "Don't worry," he tells the boss. "I know what I'm doing." Unfortunately, he doesn't and he gets the two items mixed up. So, rather bizarrely, the finished product is a combination of the two albums. And what the listener actually gets is one summery number with pleasant beats followed by a track where a Kevin Shields-like melody can just be heard in the background behind all that bloody noise before another chill out number commences.
Because this is pretty much what you get once you get past the first track, Escape, which features some twee girly-singing over some eastern sounding arrangements that makes you think of Cocteau Twins on holiday in India. After that, it's the title track with a pretty melody just about discernable in a wind tunnel. Then, I Swim Alone, and suddenly the world's a more relaxing place. After that, it's Love Is Slow where you can just about make out a pretty melody behind the sound of the cleaner doing a spot of vacuuming in the studio. Lake Slow and Free continue this pattern. And so on until the album ends with Smile, an acoustic instrumental with some rather annoying laughing in the background, when by rights My Bloody Valentine should have been saying their farewell with twenty minutes of feedback.
That's not to criticise the actual content of Honeysky (which was originally released in Japan in 2004) because Guitar – Michael Luckner and Ayako Akashba – do both these types of music rather well with Free, which marries that distortion to a somewhat bouncy feel, and the toe-tapping Heretogether being particularly worthy of mention. That doesn't stop me thinking, however, that on this evidence they need to decide where they're going and what they want Guitar to be. Or at the very least, think in future about sequencing their tracks in a less jarring manner.
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