'Loveless': The Greatest Album of Sometimes

There's a long list of albums that have blown my mind before. There's a short list of albums that blew my mind upon first listen. On that note, I'll never forget my first time listening to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. A 1991 album made to warp the world's eardrums for decades to come.

You can talk all the crap you want about Pitchfork Media, but I may have never tried this album out if it wasn't for their high praise of it. They've made 3 different lists of the best albums of the 90s. Loveless has ranked #2 once and #1 twice. Is it really that good? I'm gonna say yes. I currently have my own 90s list where its ranked #5. But I can dig through a couple old blog posts of mine where I've claimed this to be the greatest album of the 90s, and argue it being the greatest album of my entire lifetime. So Loveless is kinda the greatest album of all time. Sometimes.

...See what I did there? "Sometimes" is a song title from this album? I'm a funny guy! Ok, I'm done.

I gotta admit, none of these songs sound right if you place them in the middle of a playlist. It's not even a case of them being too holistic or too weird to stand out. Some albums are just meant to be heard from front-to-back, in order to fully appreciate what it's giving you. I feel that way about Marvin Gaye's What's Going On for example, where most of those tracks are supposed to be intertwined with each other. As for Loveless? None of these songs sound like obvious singles. Over a few years, I was sporadically trying out individual tracks from this, and nothing ever piqued my interest. It sounded like some weird early-90s rock music. But it wasn't immediately grabbing me like those 90s indie heroes like Pavement or Built To Spill. It wasn't until my fall 2013 semester at USU when I shrugged my shoulders and decided to give this full album a shot. 

This was a life-changer. I had the full album memorized after 1 listen. Played it constantly for the rest of the semester. And still play it frequently, years later. I've revisited it a lot lately, as it is autumn again in Logan UT, and that always means it's time to listen to Loveless.

I'm gonna set aside a lot of my fancy words and nerdy music knowledge for this review. Simply put: Nothing else sounds like this. This is pure magic. This is spiraling up into heaven at just the thought of love. And if you're in the midst of heartache, it turns that experience into a warm haze. This music was often the soundtrack to me walking and running around my neighborhood as a anxious/neurotic college kid who tried keeping his heart full of desires and romanticism. If Nirvana's Nevermind officially started the 90s and that decade's future artistic movements, Loveless is what officially killed the 80s, by way of advancing the creative limits of alternative rock beyond competition.

So what will this album sound like to YOU? Ummm... Probably a bunch of guitars that sound like an argument between different brands of vacuum cleaners.

Yeah, so I'm not always in the mood for Loveless. But when I am, it is the greatest album of all time. I wish I could give y'all a nice full history of the "shoegaze" genre, but I still feel like a novice compared to its truest fans. Pretty much everyone across the board will call Loveless the greatest shoegaze album of all time. The king of albums made by artists experimenting all they can with guitar pedals, to the point where you can't tell what instruments are making what noises anymore. So much time messing with pedals, that to watch these songs performed live, is to watch musicians literally just gazing at their shoes. This has to be both the dumbest and greatest genre of all time.

By all means, Loveless includes plenty of synthesizer sounds blended in with its guitars. Yet even on its most beautiful songs, the distorted noises may come off as unrelenting to some folks. How can a song be "beautiful" and "unrelenting" at the same time? On of my favorite songs on here is "To Here Knows When." As soft and airy as the atmosphere consistently is, I sometimes forget that there are clashing guitar parts appearing throughout the whole song. It's also a great example of the singing approach and vocal effects used on this album. I had no idea what Bilinda Butcher was singing on here. Because her voice refuses to use any clear form of diction as she sings. And her whispered little words are smothered in studio reverb. Upon reading the lyrics, I found out this song vaguely describes being in the middle of a threesome. Huh. The more you know. The tracks sung by guitarist Kevin Shields have the same qualities as well. Let's talk about Kevin for a sec...

I write and perform my own music sometimes. I am not the most talented guitarist in the world, by any means. But when it comes to chord progressions, I cannot deny the influence of those musical elements on Loveless. For 30 years, tons of artists have tried to emulate this album's extreme tightrope balance between distortion and reverb effects. As for me? Learning to play these songs on guitar was so freaking fun. "To Here Knows When" technically just has a few chords repeated for 5 minutes. But NONE of them are normal. I wish I knew the proper technical "music theory" terms for this... But you play your basic chords that can make up your usual pop/rock song. And just place a couple fingers somewhere else. Switch it up a smidgen. Far from jazz, but too cool and impressive to teach your friends, I use "Kevin Shields chords" a lot in my songs. I suppose this same technique was pretty darn common throughout the 70s, with every band from Led Zeppelin to Earth, Wind & Fire. As for My Bloody Valentine, the progressions are actually more accessible, and deceptively simpler. Just add a ton of layered effects, and you get that MBV sound.

Here's a link to my favorite song on the album.

I compared this album to What's Going On earlier. No, this isn't orchestral, or built in the form of a conceptual song cycle, and definitely doesn't sound like Marvin Gaye at all. There are, however, plenty of brief experimental interludes between tracks, usually not sounding anything at all like the previous or following songs. I have 2 personal favorites. I found out the slow silent chords at the end of "Only Shallow" is literally just a piece from "Sometimes," slowed-down and played backwards (HOLY NUTS). And of course, I'll never forget my first time hearing the waterfall of keyboard flutes looped for over a minute at the end of "What You Want."

Then of course, there are pro's and con's to albums where I claim "nothing else sounds like this." Like I said, none of these songs sound good on playlists. Even MBV themselves have a couple other LP's in their discography, and neither of them really sound like this. Sometimes artists just set aside all their previous and future songwriting and production styles to build an album that belongs in its own world. An experience in and of itself. These songs belong here, and don't belong anywhere else. Which is why "When I'm Sixty-Four" will always be my least favorite song on Sgt. Pepper, but I digress. I'm gonna write some more romantic stuff now. We're almost done.

Unlike most of my all-time personal favorite albums, I can't say much about lyrical connection to these songs. Because I usually don't know what's actually being said. And sometimes they're talking about sex (that's right, I can't relate to that). And sometimes they're just saying a mix-bag of words that are vaguely and generally related to each other. I just prepare myself for pressing play on track 1 and sinking into the next 47 minutes. Of course its sonic nature expands from being harsh and abrupt to comforting and blissful. Often all those things at once, during the same song. But for me, the flow of this album is just freaking perfect, man. It has the sonic dynamics, combined with each specific aesthetic they go for on each track, It makes for an ultimately romantic experience, made from the most experimental artistic means possible. The instrumental balance (vocals included) are enough to pull at your a heartstrings for a consistent 47 minutes. If not emotional, the sounds alone can at least blow your mind. Would love to travel back to 1991 and put this into a CD player, or cassette player, and hear this for my first time. The ultimate stretch between what I would call normal "rock" music and what counts as music made by "mysterious" recording techniques.

I can't really listen to this album and say it was made before or after 1991, seeing as everything they experiment with is a product of that era in shoegaze and alt-rock, as well as the pop landscape in their native Ireland. So does it sound dated? Nah. It just makes me wish I was alive during that time. Technically I was, as this was released before my 1st birthday, but you get the point!

I don't know if people outside the clinically chronic depression and anxiety circles have the same problem, but I miss the way I used to feel while listening to my favorite albums. It's not even a change of music taste. The stuff I got into my senior year of high school seemed to engulf my soul. Loveless, an album I fell in love with during my anxious college days, doesn't feel the same since depression has fought for my top spot in my mental illness world. But I gotta admit... The feeling is pretty darn close. Not only does the quality of this album stand the test of time, but its emotional impact on me always takes me back to the time I learned to love it. Which is why I'm writing about it on this blog.

I'd like to think that love is real. Heck, as far as the concepts on this album goes, I'd even like to think sex is real. But as far as love goes... Amid all that constant nagging between the cognitive distortions in my mind, I'd like to think this feeling exists. The Loveless experience is very much in line with this. Between all the depressive voices and anxiety-inducing sounds, it's an album full of a hope for love. Its title suggests there's no love in this experience. But that's what's at the center of all these songs. And it's a feeling I continue to long for. Sometimes.