My Bloody Valentine
Loveless
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NATN Recommended
My Bloody Valentine
Loveless
Sire/Creation, 1991
RiYL: Swervedriver, Sonic Youth, Jesus And Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr. |
The '90s will be known as the musical decade where bands really fucked around with sound as an entity, where the standard guitar-bass-drums format received stiff challenges from technology (computers, samplers, and so on). Looking forward had never been more exciting, and limits were pushed in all directions. As an artifact of this movement, Loveless has no peer. It's a grand audio statement unlike any that had come before it, forcing listeners to reconfigure their basic ideas about what songs should be, and what music can sound like.
MBV's "sound" is a force of its own. Loveless envelops you like the waves of an alien ocean, working up an almost tangible presence by which to mess around with musical convention. Somehow, Loveless manages to be both fragile and jarring, woozy and emphatic. As one review observed, "you float downstream gritting your teeth." On tracks like "Loomer" and "Sometimes," layers of guitars churn sensually, leaving wisps of sonic haze hanging in the air. On the latter, tingling distortion seeps into acoustic strumming, while Shields' submerged vocals narrate lyrics never meant for outside consumption.
You will throw your hands in the air trying to figure out how any number of passages on Loveless were committed to tape. What in the world is going on during the short instrumental "Touched," which approximates a string section tuning up underwater? One critic posited at the time, "how was it made? You'll still be wondering in the year 2000," and indeed, we are. The melting machine tones and cooing vocals of "Blown A Wish" are probably bubblegum pop in another dimension, but here they have little, if any, precedent. In fact, in the album's liner notes, no less than 18 engineers are given credit for participating in the sessions for Loveless.
Elsewhere, the album is more earth-rooted. The pounding downstrokes of opener "Only Shallow" link MBV to then-peers such as The Jesus And Mary Chain, with only Bilinda Butcher's opaque vocals gradually putting out the fire. The restless "When You Sleep" and the warped, rapture-inducing "I Only Said" paint gorgeous melodies onto the band's wall of sound, splattering them just enough off-center to ensure their carbon-based origin.
Some have argued that while Loveless is an important album, its songs, when analyzed individually, fall short of the album's larger achievements. To be fair, there are instances where the melodies do not vary much from track to track. But in all honesty, melodies aren't really the point -- MBV's "sound" is the point. That this music was actually created at all is the true achievement. If you're having trouble seeing how influential this album is, it might be because attempts to produce sounds like those on Loveless generally fall short.
Still, a few artists have toyed with the balance of electronic/organic elements to great success, including Laika, Olivia Tremor Control, Tortoise, and even The Verve and Swervedriver, whose 1993 albums A Storm In Heaven and Mezcal Head could each be viewed as a poor-man's Loveless.
My Bloody Valentine take the high road to musical bliss on Loveless, and their collective precision resulted in a record that can be imitated, but never duplicated. It's the pinnacle of a decade's worth of sonic adventures.
JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"