My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
Creation Records
My Bloody Valentine's shoegaze standard 'Loveless' turns 30. Few albums can live up to the adulation they receive. We find a way to wrap and trap things within praise. The high regard something is held in usually surpasses the material on its receiving end. Loveless is one of those rare occasions where the acclaim can't possibly overtake the work. Loveless is as defining a record as it gets.
Loveless may take some time to come around to, but it eventually scratches an itch that no other piece of recorded material could even attempt to. It sounds like nothing and nothing sounds like it. It's a true outlier of the music world. The closest comparison to Loveless, on the sonic front, is Smashing Pumpkins 'Siamese Dream' released in 1993. Both records seem to revolve around obsession and the search for the next step in the coveted 'wall of sound' formula. Sonically infinite, Loveless is horizon-like on the ears. It's hard to define what exactly is occurring as it's layered beyond belief, beyond comprehension. There's no beginning and no end to its shapes and sound - there just is.
Loveless sounds like Dublin. It partners up with the city in ways that cant really be explained, only experienced. Something about the acidicly sweet vocals and the ferocious, bent out of shape guitarwork yells 'River Dance'. Maybe in a parallel universe where Michael Flatley, tin whistles and squeeze boxes failed to find a market, who knows.
My Bloody Valentine would be dropped from Creation Records as they were seen as being too difficult to work with. It's alleged that MBV were a factor that greatly contributed to the bankruptcy of the record label. Is producing a piece of material that belongs outside of anything that came before and subsequently after worth destroying the home of its distribution? It's the kind of question that can't really be answered, but as time takes its toll it would reveal that it was the best thing that the label ever released. That has got to be some kind of reconciliation, some would say the best kind.
November 4th, 1991.
