(Creation/Sire)
!!! A+ RECORDING !!!
Before the release of the
Glider EP in 1990, My Bloody Valentine seemed like an above-average noise pop band whose major claim to fame was inspiring, along with Cocteau Twins and the Jesus and Mary Chain, what British rock journos dubbed "shoegaze," encompassing bands like Lush, Slowdive, Catherine Wheel and Ride whose common approach to guitars was typified by distortion, heavy on effects. Most of the shoegaze bands sprang from England and revolved around a scene in London that tended to be derided by critics as detached and cultish. My Bloody Valentine, led by the supposedly mad scientist-like guitarist Kevin Shields, were a Dublin group, a distinction that meant a great deal, and were much older, which meant more. The band had its genesis in the late '70s, when Shields and drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig were teenagers. Their story progressed slowly, painstakingly, in keeping with what would become their reputation.
Shields is an interesting case, as rock musicians go. He lived around New York until he was ten, at which point his family returned to their home in Ireland and he became entrenched in the pop music world of the '70s as explicated by
Melody Maker and
Top of the Pops; in other words, despite an untimely departure from what was about to become the nucleus of one of the most fertile periods in popular music, he found his home. Nevertheless, he and Ó Cíosóig were seduced by punk along with everyone else and were aping their heroes as early as 1978 under the name The Complex. My Bloody Valentine itself began in 1983 when lead singer Dave Conway joined up. You can hear Conway on the band's first album (some say it's a "mini-album," but "album" and "EP" are exhausting enough distinctions),
This Is Your Bloody Valentine, and several poorly received EPs including
Geek and
Sunny Sundae Smile. At this stage, thanks to Conway's swaggering melodrama, they were a shadow of the Cure, Joy Division and Nick Cave and all the goth-tinged seriousness thereby implied (although
This Is Your... qualifies as a sort of protection against the later accusations that the band liberally lifted their sound from the Jesus and Mary Chain, since its recording in late 1984 predates the other band's explosion by nearly a year; similar charges in regard to the Birthday Party are harder to contest).
Once Conway was extracted from the lineup (he now writes sci-fi novels), the band recruited bassist Debbie Googe and, most crucially, Bilinda Butcher. Butcher plays guitar and keyboards on MBV's records but she also joins Shields in taking over for Conway on vocals. The impact on the band's sound and future by this development would qualify as immeasurable if one of the most fascinating back catalogs in alt-rock didn't make it perfectly easy to chart. Shields and Butcher don't trust themselves nearly as much as Conway; they fuss over their vocals, they almost whisper at times, and they tend to let their voices recede into the background of songs that increasingly tower with dreamy noise and buzz. Almost instantly, My Bloody Valentine gain a
sound as a result of this evident shortcoming -- one distinctive enough to inspire a movement but also to never quite be duplicated in the nearly thirty years since.
My Bloody Valentine developed gradually, on a series of increasingly intriguing extended-plays, with each release presenting something that its predecessor had lacked. The feedback was always there, if muddied up by the cliches of post-punk and (on songs like "Don't Cramp My Style") thrash.
Geek! added a layer of almost constant white noise.
The New Record by My Bloody Valentine dispensed with a little of the gloomy machismo and acquired pop, melody, you name it, though you could still barely hear it; what do you want!?
Sunny Sundae Smile is downright twee -- the title cut could be an Ian Broudie song -- though still heavy and traditional in a manner that would be discarded as soon as Conway departed.
The next two EPs,
Ecstasy and
Strawberry Wine later collected as the excellent full length
Ecstasy and Wine, are the turning point. Dream pop becomes the framework, but with more sophistication than is typical of the genre, derived from psychedelia and underground heroes like Love and the Velvet Underground. The songs are swoony -- and the two singers coo and aah at length -- but they also
breathe, they take time to explore grooves and rhythms, and they aspire to live in memory as songs as much as sounds. Shields finds a way by this point (1987) to make his feedback experimentation not just alienating but
beautiful, and at best both as on "Clair."
Strawberry Wine marks what sounds like the end of conventional folk-rock riffs in Shields' songwriting, but he at this point would have had a fully formed enough band conceptually and musically to be on his way.
But then came a legendary signing with Creation Records, and everything changed. My Bloody Valentine's breakthrough release was the EP
You Made Me Realise, whose trebly and barely-stereo sound serve mostly to hide from the ingenuity and variance in its songwriting, and in the band's sudden confidence as a unit. More than goth rockers or mere twee romantics at this point, they are playing and singing music that discovers new, strange ways to be not just intellectually interesting but resonant and
sexy. Everything tentative is suddenly gone. The proper LP
Isn't Anything goes further -- the songs are weirder, less complete, almost disembodied; it's a complete anomaly and quite an invention unto itself. It was this album that gave way to MBV being labeled no longer a Mary Chain cover band but the originators of an entire scene. It also displayed Shields' savviness with concept; for instance, he left the noisier and punkier songs off and released them on a separate 12" (
Feed Me with Your Kiss) so that the odd, surreal mood of the album was perfectly sustained. This indicator of the auteur's perfectionism, of course, carried foreboding indications for the band's future.
You can hear a lot of what the singers sing reasonably well on
Isn't Anything. There are traces of discordance, like on "Lose My Breath," and the record inherits
Realise's eroticism while also -- with a greater recording budget -- adding greatly to the band's warmth and dynamics. And the album's biggest innovation comes in the moments when the feedback, accompanied at times by keyboards, multitracked guitars and the vocals that Shields and Butcher were beginning to think of as just another instrument, doesn't just hiss or squeal but
roars, discovering something musical and invigorating in the cacophony. Shields was dissatisfied. But in a sense, this would again have been
enough.
A lot of money was expended on recording the follow-up to
Isn't Anything; it famously bankrupted Creation Records and got Shields in all sorts of trouble with excessive studio time, the other members of the band feeling alienated, the press impatient, the label terrified. An EP,
Glider, slipped out in 1990 with a proposed album song, an instrumental and two cuts that sounded like a logical progression from
Isn't Anything. The album song, "Soon," was telling, though; it resembled none of the band's earlier work, save for the layered vocals by Butcher -- another absolute turnaround, but also an obvious progression. Brian Eno would memorably label it "the vaguest piece of music ever to have been a hit," quite a remark from that source. One thing for sure: it indicated that the band had already left the shoegazers behind. Another advance EP,
Tremolo, followed. Then, after any number of studio changes, financial crises and panic attacks from Creation's top brass Alan McGee, at last came the evocatively titled
Loveless in November 1991 -- more than two years after work on it began.
If you want an afternoon to go by very quickly, search for My Bloody Valentine on Youtube sometime. Not only can you watch them progress in various badly-shot but fascinating live shows starting as early as 1987, you can see the obviously shy and withdrawn Kevin Shields suffer through interviews, sometimes along side the even shyer Bilinda Butcher, from around the time
Loveless was released. Shields, not even twenty-nine yet then, comes across as you'd expect: like a young cocky rock musician, the bane of whose existence is "assholes" in recording studios telling him what to do. He's forthcoming about how vital the creative freedom provided by the by-a-thread label is to MBV's continued existence, but rebuffs questions about the dilemma he put them in; and there's a cringe-inducing moment when one interviewer attempts to ask the two of them, who were then in a romantic relationship, about the "sexual balance" in the group.
It's a badly phrased line of thought -- not nearly as embarrassing as the idiot who, in a 2014 interview, informs the infinitely patient Debbie Googe that he had crushes on her as well as Butcher, "especially back in the '80s" -- but it gets at something that is one of the key sonic developments on
Loveless. In bands with a male-female dynamic in the singing like the Go-Betweens, Belle & Sebastian or My Bloody Valentine, it alters the band's sound, makes it something different. Already on older MBV records, Butcher and Shields had often sung on the same track, sometimes in duets and at times with one backing up the other. On
Loveless, their roles become more complicated. Buried as the vocal tracks are, they are unexpectedly intricate, with the two of them sometimes in perfect unison, one high (typically Shields) and one low; sometimes harmonizing but never conventionally; often tracked many times over; and very, very often singing in such a way that it's difficult to tell them apart. Their work here attains an androgyny that contributes to the album's horizon of weightless mystery but also its utility as a universal, sensory experience: obviously human but free of any forced meaning.
The other major evolution here is in Shields' guitar playing; by this time, as well as the band played together live, My Bloody Valentine in the studio essentially
was Shields, a dynamic that's been treated with cheerful acceptance by Googe and eye-rolling frustration by Butcher. Since the early '80s, Shields had been toying with the bending of notes, with alternative tuning, with the tremolo arm -- an incredibly simple trick, but an aurally striking one that had never been incorporated into a rock band's music quite like it was on
Loveless, including on the prior MBV releases that began to experiment with it. On this album, entire songs are built around the concept of this specific brand of disorientation.
It sounds like a lot of things that it isn't: corroded or malfunctioning tape, perhaps, or a flanger or some sort of elaborate distortion pedal. In fact, Shields wasn't using reverb, modulators, chorus or flanging at this point in his career and used only standard pedals, those sparingly. What you're hearing on
Loveless is done primarily with just the guitars and amps. Nevertheless there are some tricks with tape and, of course, extensive overdubbing; he uses the studio, tries to use it more intimately than most engineers would let him, and does whatever is needed to get the sound in his head onto a record, including mostly mono sound. Brian Wilson circa
Pet Sounds is a good frame of reference. Like Wilson, Shields' goal is hard to articulate but its emotional and sonic impact on the listener speaks for itself. You don't know, intuitively, if the sound of
Loveless is accomplished by means that are simple or complicated. If you have no experience as a musician or around musicians, you have little reason to particularly care. But you know that the sound is
different in a basic, primal way that can't really be described or pared down, and Shields could likely not have gotten us to that unfussy realization if he'd done this with a cloud of studio dust. The magic lasts across the literal decades too, since no one has appropriated the record's sound with complete success.
That is part of why
Loveless is so unique, but not necessarily why it's great. In the cacophony, the grinding, the metallic bed of sound and the roar of it all, Shields discovers something so simple as catchy pop music that is resonant and addictive. The chosen medium of loudness matters, because it makes this a non-literal experience and puts us all floating and dizzy into a wonderful trance, especially played at top volume. It's druggy music insofar as it becomes the drug itself.
Loveless starts exactly the same way as
Isn't Anything, with an opening drumbeat marking time until throwing us off the cliff. This time we're diving into "Only Shallow," a scream of multitracked guitars that hiss and growl, a chaos broken eventually by Butcher's murmurs. We can guess at what she's saying if we want. We don't have to. It sounds like the hard parts of passion regardless, and the wildly expressive dynamic of soft melody and howling, transportive noise tells the whole story. "Loomer" is even prettier and more grotesque, Butcher humming over some barren landscape of all-but-tuneless feedback squall where time has stopped. The strange thing is not that it sounds completely
wrong at first, but that it very quickly starts to seem where-have-you-been-all-my-life perfect.
"To Here Knows When" may be the defining track of
Loveless. Again it prominently features Butcher's defiantly pretty vocals, now over a sonic soundstage of loop-pedaled feedback that is nothing short of enchanting as it seems to expand and contract organically, with more droning, so-very-wrong roaring guitar behind all of this.
Loveless isn't prog; it has no such flighty ambitions for itself, its sounds are visceral rather than intellectual, and from what little we can make out of the lyrics (which, in a testament to the band's attention to detail, were nonetheless endlessly debated and revised), they are about the groggy thoughts we have just after waking up with someone and the troubles and joys entailed by that, following up an album filled with imagery of sex, violence and death. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the splendidly suggestive title implies an enforced distance between people. Maybe we are meant to hear just enough of the words to vaguely understand. It's poetry to match a complex musical idea achieved simply. "When You Sleep" can be described as nothing but pure pop despite its maximized volume; here Butcher and Shields sing together, multitracked about a dozen times and basking in a parade of hooks with guitars that would sound almost normal if the sheer number of them didn't create such a strange, alien effect. There are riffs and solos here, used the same way they are in any rock song, but the strange way they are played and recorded reshuffles the witness, makes us hear the way we respond to all pleasurable music in a distinctly new way, as though we're being rebuilt from scratch.
Both that song and "I Only Said" are built on looped riffs that barely sound like guitars, more like synthesiers or flutes (and indeed, MBV hired a flautist for live shows after
Loveless; shades of Jethro Tull!?). To the band's arsenal of deceptively simple effects "I Only Said" adds repetition; the resulting hypnotic state matters less than the lingering, unresolved tension thereby created. The vocal melody, here centered upon Shields as far as we can tell, is equally impressive with its clipped verses that seem to finish a line halfway before starting what would feel like a different song if not for the consistent instrumentation; that means more than just that it's a shapeshifter.
Loveless is the perfect nonverbal elaboration of tentative breakdowns in communication. It's like jazz, specifically free jazz -- dealing strictly with reactions to instruments, Shields and MBV find the emotional in the abstract.
The hypnosis effect reaches a peak in the album's midsection. After "I Only Said" lingers on its central trill for about six minutes, one of the album's darkest, slowest songs continues the spell. "Come in Alone" is almost a plod of sorts, hitting an implied romance with careful rhythm that would cast it as something very different from the rest of
Loveless if the detailed production weren't so careful to incorporate the sound of the record at large in service to this track's specific beauty. Here more than ever the vocals are ambiguously gendered; you might think you know who's singing when, but you really don't. That astonishing, fevered sensuality -- a big part of what keeps one returning so often to this album -- carries forward to the famously gorgeous "Sometimes," a song that all but literalizes the feeling of being picked up and carried around by this music. Heard properly on good speakers or headphones, it's rapturously beautiful and absorbing. And while the powerful guitars, overdubbed on top of one another off into the impossible distance, are searing with love and pain, Shields' vocal is the elegiac vessel that glides through the changes and surrounds us. The less widely appreciated "Blown a Wish" is nearly as striking, another strange and clipped melody, here by Butcher, blown out into infinity by distortion but retaining its confessional, gut-level appeal as songcraft.
By 1991, over the better part of a decade, My Bloody Valentine had evolved from multiple incarnations and aspirations into a deservedly legendary guitar band, led (some say dominated) by a true visionary. Listening to their catalog now, it's astounding how linear the sense is that everything seems to have been slowly leading up to
Loveless, a record that impresses and galvanizes to the extent that you can fool yourself into thinking it was a miracle that came from nowhere. But no, not only because
Isn't Anything is a bright and complete artifact itself, but because
Loveless simply synthesizes and pays off everything that Shields had learned. The last two songs on
Loveless are as perfect, confident and restlessly creative as any rock band ever gets. The Shields-led "What You Want" seems divorced from any sense of time, a yearning pop song with a miraculously enveloping sound, the kind of recording so solidly brilliant that you could look at any element of it and be impressed. On one layer it's towering power pop, on another a stunning feedback exploration, on another something that manages surprising depth in its distant, wailed lyricism. He seems to be putting every bit of himself into it, and by the end of the song the exhaustion is palpable. Then a remaining loop rests for a time, one of many beautiful interludes that sound almost like accidents, and segues abruptly into "Soon."
More than any other
Loveless track -- which is saying a lot -- "Soon" sounds
new. It had already been released on
Glider in 1989, but its positioning as the climax of this album still makes sense. Driven on a drum machine and the album's clearest riff, then another of Shields' oddball loops, the song sounds like a different band altogether. It sounds like something on the radio, really. Then suddenly, it explodes with guitar and without sparing us a second to process that, Butcher starts singing the group's strongest melody yet; the beat continues, so do the guitars, and it's almost as if the sun seems to come up after a long, bleary night. Several things remain surprising about "Soon" -- first that it does not sound like a relic of the shoegaze era. Second, that it's so easy to recognize but so indescribable. Third, that Butcher's vocal is so atypically confident, especially stacked against the rest of this album. All that makes this towering production sounds simultaneously like the beginning and end of something. Even though it was the first song released from
Loveless, "Soon" seems to look toward the future with its suggestions of trip hop and club music fused with violently engaging guitar and its warping of what jamming out to the edge of the runout groove means in the context of rock music and disco. It's the kind of thing you hear and wonder what the hell we've been doing for the last twenty-five years.
But it also sounds oddly resigned, in a splendid and cathartic sense. Capturing the mood in the UK at the tail end of the Creation era, which Googe and probably the others would readily tell you was a very special time and place to be in a band, MBV seem aware on "Soon" that this is their moment and they are making the best of it. In a strange way, it already sounds nostalgic, like a million lost things inarticulately captured on wax. The flood of the years since seems to somehow be burned into it. It's a monumentally pretty and sad song, but it's also beat-driven and celebratory. Those contradictions, not least of them being pop pleasure burned out by overdriven sound and self-imposed enigma, are what made My Bloody Valentine and
Loveless, which is the moment they were entitled to and their gift to us.
Loveless was released within two months of
Nevermind, the album the music press chose as the heralded new faith of future rock music. It took many years, but
Loveless is as widely celebrated as a classic now as Nirvana's album was almost immediately, and it's obvious now whose work had the more lasting effect on alternative rock if not the mainstream. My Bloody Valentine went on a widely remembered and mythologized tour in the year after the album's release. Shields might have been the extent of the band in the studio, but on stage they were a unit that played together brilliantly, whose modesty of appearance (Googe's wildly enthusiastic, manic movements excluded) belied the hugeness of the noise they generated. When you saw MBV live then (and if you see one of their reunion gigs now), the key moment is what's called "the holocaust," an interlude in "You Made Me Realise" that only goes on for a few seconds on the record but is expanded to ten or more minutes in live performances. Shields and Butcher stand still on opposite ends of the stage in front of their amps and, rapidly strumming the same chord for what seems like ages, generate a wall of feedback that's said to make people gradually lose their heads as it goes louder and louder. Eventually, at a certain decibel level, they go into a blissed-out trance state and maybe start laughing hysterically or just feeling
high, so to speak, if they last long enough. Then, when the band is satisfied that their work is done, the song finishes. It's dangerous. Maybe irresponsible. (Signs always instruct audiences that earplugs are a requirement for an MBV gig.) But it says a lot about what the band was always looking to accomplish with sound -- yet again, as with their lyrics and bizarre use of conventional instrumentation, it's the quest for a feeling that can't really be pared down with words. But the idealized result is a kind of joy, a transcendent experience.
After
Loveless, Creation was practically busted. (Sire released the album Stateside but it didn't do much here for a long time.) On the strength of the excitement generated in the press, especially the British press, about the album, My Bloody Valentine signed with Island and -- as an antidote to the head-butting from the 1989-91 period -- built their own home studio. But the well quickly ran dry. Recording on a follow-up started and stopped numerous times until everyone except Shields and Butcher gave up. Finally, in 1997, Butcher threw in the towel and the band essentially ended. Shields worked with Yo La Tengo, Primal Scream and Sofia Coppola. As time stretched on infinitely post-
Loveless, increasingly sounding like the ethereal sendoff for a brilliant band whose star shone only briefly, he got a reputation as an eccentric perfectionist a la Terrence Malick. Interviews don't really bear this out. He admits to taking a long time to do things, but the air of arrogance surrounding a twentysomething who knows what he wants has faded. Shown these days with long gray hair (has that much time really passed already?) and a boyish enthusiasm for the elaborate effects pedals he once shunned, he seems more philosophical and lighthearted, which is what happens to people. Googe, who worked as a cab driver for a while then toured with Primal Scream and (currently) Thurston Moore, goes to gigs with him. Butcher has three children. The world moves on from thrashy kinds pogoing around in the front row of London shows in the '80s that still survive on fanmade video in curious perpetuity.
My Bloody Valentine reconvened in 2008 and eventually -- quickly, by Shields' standards -- released an album five years later. Mostly recorded in the '90s, it sounds like what it is: a solid follow-up from a band that wasn't quite sure where to go next. By Shields' own admission, it doesn't have the
Loveless quality of "looking into another world." Recorded mostly in the mid-'90s during the Island period, when the band members were all in the same place waiting for something to happen, it doesn't radicalize My Bloody Valentine's position -- with the expectations attached, that would have been very difficult -- and doesn't necessarily "evolve," a concession made even by its champions. Its biggest contribution to the band's legacy, besides a well-deserved victory lap and some good songs, is that it places less emphasis on song structure and melody but is also less attuned to an ideal of
mystery. As an entity, My Bloody Valentine was never really as mysterious as critics made them out to be anyway, but their music was.
It may be that
Loveless is a hard act to follow, made harder by the long silence afterward, because it essentially says and does everything MBV could have done. It's a nearly immaculate creation, timeless and ghostly, and it demands to be heard in sequence and without distraction like few other albums. A consistent drone and roar accompany the entire album, its mood established beautifully and confrontationally then elaborated upon on a series of romantically charged pop songs that nevertheless put one face to face with the unknown in their endlessly weird, sensual sound. Not only does it do something genuinely different with rock music, it expands the idea of the album for the CD era (though I have no doubt it would be something to hear on analogue vinyl, I've never had the pleasure) -- on top of crafting an ambiance that's never disrupted (even by the relative throwaway "Touched," which serves mostly as a tape-looped intro to "To Here Knows When" and prelude to "I Only Said"), like
Pet Sounds it offers songs that comment on one another musically if not conceptually and, unlike
Pet Sounds, provies an impetus for both massively loud shared catharsis and intensely private indulgence in sound and song.
We're moving into the subjective here but I think it's the greatest, most beautiful rock album recorded in my lifetime -- borne out by the sensation that it never seems to age, like the band and I have, and still sounds newly revealing and richer yet each time it surrounds me yet again. I'm not alone in this assertion. Follow-up or no follow-up, we're lucky the unique moment in which
Loveless could be made existed. Because as a piece of music, its moment won't ever pass. I think
that's enough.
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