Loveless, the seminal shoegaze record, turns 30 this November
1991 had a lot going for it. From Nirvana’s Nevermind to Pearl Jam’s Ten to The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik, 1991 is possibly one of the single most important years in rock music. Despite the competition, the album from that year that arguably has remained the most influential to this day is Loveless by My Bloody Valentine.
Loveless was like nothing before it. Sure, through the album you can faintly hear frontman Kevin Shields’ influence from bands like The Cure, or The Jesus and Mary Chain, and Hüsker Dü, but what My Bloody Valentine created from those predecessors helped to spur a whole new genre of its own.
One of the pioneers of shoegaze — jokingly named for band members’ habits of staring at their feet to control multiple effect pedals while performing — My Bloody Valentine’s sound is loud and distorted, full of the hazy vocals and driving guitars that continue to define the genre to this day.
Yet this sound didn’t come without a great deal of work and turmoil. Loveless took almost three years to finish, cycling through eighteen studios, sixteen audio engineers, and ended up costing somewhere between $230,000 to $500,000 — figures noticeably higher than other independent releases of the time. On top of that, the mental and financial stress from the years-long production led to the emotional breakdown of band members and Creation Records executives, who ended up being the label to release the project.
Shields, often described as somewhat of a perfectionist artist à la Brian Wilson or Syd Barrett, has gone on to claim this production length as on par with other similar acts, and that the price estimate has been inflated.
Regardless of the record’s inception, once it was released, it started making waves. Loveless emerged from the studio as a record full of abstract melodies, blown-out noise, and androgynous, sensual vocals. Despite its griminess, the attention to detail employed through the production saga is always evident.
Loveless opens swinging right out of the gate. The first track, “Only Shallow,” grabs you within the first few seconds as lurching guitars reverberate and then give way to smooth, feminine lyrics about thirty seconds in. The song paints a picture of the dichotomy between the abrasive instrumentation and production, and the ethereal vocals present through the whole album.
Around the halfway mark you’re met with “When You Sleep,” the earworm of the album. “When You Sleep” is something of a perfect song. As catchy as it is blurry and distorted, there’s a love song in there, but that’s not really the point.
This vagueness is the case for many My Bloody Valentine songs; the lyrics are more of a gesture to an emotion that the instrumentation accompanies, rather than a story within themselves. As Shields told The Guardian, he wanted My Bloody Valentine’s music to sound like “the most beautiful songs with the most extremeness of physicality and sound.”
The frontman added that, in fact, many online resources have the lyrics all wrong. Shields explained that many are “completely wrong, sometimes in really key areas. Part of me really likes the folk song element of that — people changing things, having their own version of reality — and part of me thinks I should go through them like a teacher, correcting them.”
The tenuous connection between the lyrics and sonic quality is possibly most evident in “Sometimes,” one of the band’s most famous songs. There’s the sense that the song is telling a story of a love lost, but even a look through Genius.com will leave you unsatisfied with that simple of an answer. Even only making out one of every few words, the track envelops listeners in a sonic blanket that is distorted yet comforting. A song for walking through a brightly-lit city at night, “Sometimes” uses its melody alone to create a dreamy atmosphere of angst and yearning.
On closing track “Soon,” the sounds of both shoegaze and dreampop’s future are on full display. First appearing as the opener to the band’s 1990 EP Glider, “Soon” is a hypnotic, danceable track that spans nearly seven minutes. Ambient music pioneer Brian Eno even labeled “Soon” as “a new standard for pop”. He was right. Give the track a listen and you’ll hear its direct influence on bands like Radiohead, Ride, Lush, Smashing Pumpkins, and many more.
Loveless is an album with few peers. Thirty years on, it continues to stand alone as a monument to its genre, and to independent music at large.
