Celebrating Kevin Shields on his 61st birthday. —Ed.
My Bloody Valentine’s famously obsessed frontman spent 3 long years and a whole shitload of other peoples’ money making this 1991 shoegaze classic, and he didn’t deliver a follow-up until 2013. Seems Kevin Shields found Kevin Shields a tough act to follow. As for the guy whose money he spent (Creation Records honcho Alan McGee), his verdict on the record is on the record. In 2014 he said, “Loveless is fucking overrated as fuck.”
Well I humbly fucking disagree. While there are brief moments on Loveless when my attention wanders, My Bloody Valentine’s “sheets of tampered guitar noise meet dreamy melodies and hushed vocals” recipe is a winning one. The songs contained therein are simultaneously abrasive and deliciously mesmerizing–Loveless is as hypnotic a drug as nembutal, but it won’t put you to sleep.
The formula’s simple–Shields utilizes a whole mess of tricks (reverse reverb, tremolo techniques, tuning systems, samplers, etc.) to create oceanic swells and tidal washes of guitar that he harnesses to beguiling melodies over which he and Bilinda Butcher sing like sedated angels. Every single review I’ve ever read has described the guitars on this record as “swirling,” but that’s not what I hear. I hear churning–the churning of raw distortion into creamy dream pop butter.
Both mood and volume vary–for some reason “Only Shallow” and “What You Want” are twice as loud as anything else on the LP–but for the most part what you get are a set of songs that sound, well, like some mad genius fucked with them in the studio until they sounded wrong–wrong in such a way that obliges you, dear listener, to grow an entirely new set of ears in order to hear them right. And you do. After a while the brain-melting seesaw guitars and slushy and pureed vocals not only begin to make sense but to sound inevitable–as inevitable as any great forward leap in music, or any of the arts for that matter.
The folks who produced this music may have spent their time on stage staring at their feet, but that’s hardly one’s experience as a listener–I’m too busy being buffeted to and fro by the unrelenting waves of ecstatic-making guitar. This is Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound on drugs, and like all good drug music Loveless is less an adjunct to and more a simulacrum of the narcotic experience. It reminds me of what Salvador Dali once said, to wit, “I don’t need drugs. I am drugs.”
Unlike some, I don’t consider Loveless an object of divine worship one daren’t say a single negative thing about, lest one be drummed out of civilized society and sent into the wilderness like Chuck Connors during the opening credits of the sixties TV show Branded. Indeed much of side one (i.e., the three songs between the bone-crushing opener “Only Shallow” and “pop gone weird” closer “When You Sleep”) drags by at an enervating crawl. But side two’s a triumph marred only by the sleepy-to-the-point-of-narcolepsy “Sometimes.”
Yep, side two’s a doozy. The rave-friendly “Soon” sounds like it just jetted in from Madchester, sorted for e’s and whizz. Shoegaze my ass–this baby’s a fucking dance track. “Blown a Wish” is a psychedelic paean to God, its melody a flickering candle that the breathless Butcher is afraid to blow out. Meanwhile, “What You Want” is a riotous rave-up in which everything goes by in a supersonic blur except for Butcher’s super-breezy “Oooo’s.”
“When You Sleep” is big and brash and shows the influence of J. Mascis and Dinosaur Jr. As for “I Only Said,” I have no idea what alchemical formula Shields used to create such dreamy delirium–this is the sound of a piece of operating heavy machinery melting into a pool of golden light, and how can such a thing be possible?
The Cure’s Robert Smith (is there another one?) called Loveless “the sound of someone who is so driven that they’re demented.” Which I guess makes the title ironical, because Loveless is so clearly a labor of obsessive love. That Shields more or less disappeared upriver like a rock’n’roll Colonel Kurtz after making it lends the album a mystique it wouldn’t possess had My Bloody Valentine released a follow-up a year or two later, but make no mistake–Loveless would be the stuff of legends regardless.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
