Loveless |
|
Released: November 5, 1991 Peak: -- US, 7 UK, -- CN, 6 AU Click for codes to charts. Sales (in millions): 0.25 US, 0.1 UK, 0.35 world (includes US and UK) Genre: alternative rock > shoegaze |
Tracks:Song Title (Writers) [time] (date of single release, chart peaks)
Total Running Time: 48:31 The Players:
|
Rating: 3.970 out of 5.00 (average of 20 ratings)
Quotable:“The defining album of shoegaze.” —Devon Chodzin, Paste magazineAwards:(Click on award to learn more).
|
MBV’s Background“My Bloody Valentine is really the story of Kevin Shields.” JD He “was devoted to psychedelia and the idea of creating a world that existed only in the space between the headphones. Born in Queens, N.Y., Shields moved to Dublin with his family when he was 11 years old, and he never shook the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. School took a back seat to music – he learned to play guitar by mimicking the down strokes on the Ramones’ concert album, It’s Alive – and his parents let his bands rehearse in the living room on Sunday afternoons. My Bloody Valentine formed in 1983 as a gloomy, mascara-wearing Goth band enamored of the Cramps, the Doors and the Birthday Party.” JDThe group released an EP in 1985, split up in 1986, and then Shields relocated to London and assembled a new version of the group featuring singer and guitarist Bilinda Butcher, with whom he had a romantic relationship up until about the time of Loveless, and drummer Colm O’Ciosig. Bassist Debbie Googe joined later and the band recorded two EPs in 1987. The Debut AlbumIn 1988, the band signed to Creation Records and released their debut album, Isn’t Anything. While the band’s early stuff had “a rather simple (and bland) retro-pop sound…[they] started to push the sonic envelope with…Isn’t Anything.” PKThey “gave their best whack at both Joy Division-esque goth rock and C86-indebted jangle pop.” CQ “Shields hit on the sound that would become his signature…strumming the strings of his Fender Jazz Master while holding the tremolo arm or ‘whammy bar,’ a relic of the surf era that provided a unique pitch bend. As a result, the instrument was constantly going slightly in and out of tune, an effect Shields amplified with the backwards reverb from a digital effects pedal.” JD “The album’s droning, layered guitars and dreamy vocals inspired a host of imitators and raised expectations for My Bloody Valentine’s second full-length album.” TB Even so, “the off-kilter modern psychedelia of that album could only hint at the full-on sonic overkill of 1991’s Loveless, an album which managed to weld Jesus & Mary Chain-styled guitar noise to Stone Roses-esque acid house retro-flower-pop.” PK “That album – along with the ‘You Made Me Realise’ single and Glider EP – unveiled a languid, dreamlike haze of ethereal vocals buried beneath a vast roar of distorted guitars and samples of sometimes indeterminate pitch.” RD Creating a Masterpiece“My Bloody Valentine started work on the follow-up to Isn’t Anything in mid 1989, but it soon became apparent that, given guitarist-songwriter Shields’ growing perfectionism, the group would not be issuing any new material soon.” TB The band took nearly three years making Loveless. It cost Creation a half million dollars JD and nearly bankrupting the company in the process. CQ Eighteen engineers were involved in the project RD “though Alan Moulder emerged as the dominant sonic architect.” JDWhat emerged, though, was “their masterpiece.” AM “founded on an impenetrable wall of dense, searing guitars and deftly programmed rhythms, which mark My Bloody Valentine as one of the first rock bands to utilize digital sampling.” TB “The Irish alterna-gods’ redefined the sonic boundaries of indie rock by setting bitter love poems afloat in a swirling ectoplasm of guitar distortion.” EW’12 Those “churning guitars form a tapestry of sound driven by undulating rhythms.” RV Loveless “invented an entirely distinctive sound all its own. It remains one of the most complex and disorienting albums in rock history.” JD It became “not just the pinnacle of experimental rock but a wallop of feeling that’s palpable with every stroke.” PM It is “a masterpiece that combines the genius of Beach Boy Brian Wilson and Sonic Youth into one awe-inspiring palette.” RV Shields himself said he “was influenced by the Velvet Underground, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and the Beach Boys – yet no matter how you triangulate thse sources, they don’t necessarily lead to the sweeping sounds of Loveless.” TM The Album’s Distinct SoundThe goal “was to capture the feeling of walking downtown on a Sunday morning when the streets are deserted and you feel strangely uncomfortable, despite the familiar surroundings.” JD Critic Adrian Denning says, “The best time to listen will be in that period between dream and awake, between states.” AD“Loveless successfully manages to craft beautiful soundscapes” PK with “an odd combination of beautiful, lulling melodies” JD that are “voluptuous yet ethereal” AM with “disturbing, unsettling noises” JD that “sound at first listen to be vacuum cleaners and air raid sirens” PK or “slurpy pitch-bends that suggest tape-recorder malfunction.” TM “Heavily synthesized guitars speed up and slow down, keeping the listener a bit ill at ease.” PK “Hypnotizing tape loops and the shimmering sound of Shields’ glide guitar add to the dreaminess.” JD Shields “was thinking less like a rock guitarist than an irreverent sound mangler.” TM “Even the propulsive rhythms are sonically slippery; most of the percussion sounds were treated or triggered electronically.” JD “The result is a blistering headphone assault” PK where “beauty comes wrapped in the guitar equivalent of barbed wire.” TM “Like the Cocteau Twins, the Valentines rarely wrote songs that were ‘about’ anything…The words are often inaudible, with the vocals placed behind the wall of guitars. The stray phrases that do emerge complement the sounds to underscore the band's recurring themes: lustful yearning, the longing for blissful escape, and feelings of overwhelming alienation.” JD “Adding to the mystery is the dreamy, sensual way in which the songs are sung.” JD Shields and Butcher’s vocals “waft in and out of the mix, acting primarily as added layers of instrumentation with little in the way of recognizable lyrics.” PK They “meld perfectly with the trippy sonics around them, suggesting druggy sex or sexy drugs.” AM “With the ever-swirling mix, they are like an aural evocation of bed spins – or the rush of a powerful drug.” JD Shields said, “It was influenced a little bit too much by Ecstasy culture.” JD The Benchmark for ShoegazeThat approach became the signature sound of shoegaze, a “scene in England (named for the guitarists' tendency to play while looking at the ground:” RV “Bury your vocals enough and you can say anything without critique because no one can hear you over a constant flood of flanged guitars. Once you’ve figured out how to make your guitars do that, it should be easy, right? For the obsessive Kevin Shields, everything from the guitar technique…to the hyper specific conjuring of want found on 1991’s Loveless had to be perfect, resulting in what should have been an overdetermined alternative rock album.” PM“Of the small crop of bands throw up by the short-lived…shoe-gazing fad of the early Nineties, My Bloody Valentine are one of the few remembered with any fondness.” RD The album became “so synonymous with shoegaze that it’s difficult to believe its creators ever made anything outside the subgenre.” CQ It “set the benchmark for all shoegaze that followed,” CQ becoming “the defining album of shoegaze.” PM Unfortunately, “the album’s perfection sounded shoegazing’s death-knell” AM because “none of their shoe-gazing contemporaries would dare follow an album so great.” RD It also “raised expectations for the next My Bloody Valentine album to unreasonably high levels” AM “because where could you take it from here?” AD “Since when could anybody reinvent music every two years? And, in truth, nobody has ever come close to what this album is trying to achieve.” AD It would be another dozen years before they released a follow-up. The Songs“From the commanding ‘Only Shallow’ and Come in Alone to breathy reflections like Sometimes and Blown a Wish, the album balances complexity and immediately memorable pop melodies with remarkable self-assurance, given its difficult creation.” AM The latter song offers “beautiful melodies provided by female vocals and guitars swimming around your utmost fantasies.” AD“Shields masters feedback and noise to create a miasmic sound from the opening of Only Shallow” RV with its “eighty-seven overdubbed guitars.” AD Indeed, the song “goes from 0 to 60 in mere seconds as it bursts in like a revving engine; Loveless hardly calms down from there.” CQ That song and When You Sleep “both show and tell emotional tapestries beyond what verse alone can conjure.” PM With its “sweeping, bombastic riff” CQ the latter is “My Bloody Valentine’s magnum opus seamlessly blends their mysteriously abrasive instrumentals with some of the most gorgeous, unforgettable melodies of indie rock’s history. It almost feels like being startled awake from a dream.” CQ It “is a far headier, trippier song than anything that came out of the original 1968 psychedelic heyday.” PK “The closing, near eight-minute long Soon sounds like ‘You Made Me Realise’ [the band’s 1988 single] turned up to some kind of heavenly angel, beyond the Spinal Tap '11' by several million miles.” AD It “fuses the Valentines’ roaring guitars with a dance-inspired beat.” AM It “is a genre-defining song and a highlight of the early 1990s.” PK Meanwhile, “the symphonic interlude Touched suggests an updated take on Fripp and Eno’s pioneering guitar/electronics experiments.” AM The album also includes “the scintillating arpeggios of To Here Knows When.” CQ It “is one of the marvels of modern recording, as guitars sweep and swirl just below the Bilinda Butcher’s barely discernible voice.” RV It “is like the blissful aftermath of an orgasm.” AD That song, as well as Loomer and What You Want features “arrangements [that] are so lush, they’re practically tangible.” AM |
Reviews:
Related DMDB Links:
First posted 3/5/2011; last updated 8/25/2026. |
