“MBV” opens with a single guitar strum followed by a vague, melancholy buzz that, I would guess, made more than a few people tear up on first listen. It’s something like pulling into your childhood neighborhood after a long absence and feeling a swelling relief as your home comes into view and you realize nothing has changed. My Bloody Valentine has been absent for 22 years – a tally that was expected to continue running into an unforeseeable future, one that would eventually hold the memory of 1991’s “Loveless” as the band’s final, iconic contribution to the classic music archives. But, sometime in 2007, frontman Kevin Shields informed the world that blood was again pumping through My Bloody Valentine. Over five years later we have, somewhat suddenly, “MBV.”

Any apprehension is understandable – diehard fans (and there are a lot of them) could probably be split into two groups: those who approached the release with religious anticipation and those who would rather spin “Loveless” through their headphones for the five hundredth time and pretend nothing else was happening. But, for better or worse, it’s here. And it’s precisely what any MBV fan could hope for – neither above nor beneath “Loveless,” but a worthy companion that picks up, creatively, where that album left off.

The guitar is again supreme ruler on “MBV.” Shields lets his fretwork become shrouded in its own distortion, occasionally allowing for notes to bite with clarity. His guitar is the expressive voice of all nine songs, with his and co-lead singer Belinda Butcher’s voice acting as a complimentary whisper and tonal balancer. Only on “New You” can you really make out the words, and even then they serve to search out some mysterious feeling in union with the instrumentals. Every song seems to be pushing towards some kind of resolution, always ending before it actually reaches it. The conflict this presents softens when you realize that getting to the end was never the point. There is no need to concern yourself with deciphering starting points, ending points or the time in between. It’s the constant little blips of feeling that are most interesting. And they come and go in their own time.