LOVELESS - my bloody valentine

Tim's Ultra Rough Guide To Rock - Part VI

*I'm repurposing a post from 2016 for some reason. Probably because I just started reading that David Cavanagh book about Creation Records only 25 years late or because I've been listening to LoveLiesCrushing's second LP Xuvetyn from 1996 which is excellent but is highly indebted to Loveless and would not exist without it. I mean when i was 19 in 1991 and this came out I bought the tape and played it to fucking death. Then a couple of months later I saw them twice at The Prince Of Wales in St Kilda. I was so obsessed I made sure I got my hands on Belinda's set list for both nights. That took pride of place on the door of my bedroom wardrobe in the sharehouse I lived in for a few years. Somewhere along the way I lost those lists. I think by about March 1992 I'd listened to my Creation cassette of Loveless so much I couldn't possibly listen to it any more. It wasn't until the early 00s that I heard it again when I found a copy on cd in an op shop which was handy as I no longer had anything to play tapes on. Since then I have the occasional listen skipping the way too overplayed Only Shallow and the previously released Soon and To Here Knows When. I mean those two tracks from Glider and Tremelo respectively had been played to death by the time I got my hands on Loveless. For me there's two classic albums in this era really, Glider and Tremelo combined and Loveless sans those aforementioned tracks...

The deliciously dazed and frenetic bewilderment of Loveless still astounds to this day. 

MY BLOODY VALENTINE - LOVELESS [1991]

Really do I need to spill another word onto a page about the merits of this LP? This recording is one of the most pillaged albums in rock’s history. The Jesus & Mary Chain laid down the blueprint via Phil Spector, The Beach Boys, The Velvet Underground, The Ramones, Dr. Mix & The Remix, Aeroplane Runways and more. Dinosaur Jr., Husker Du and Sonic Youth added the extra flavour and My Bloody Valentine made noise rock at its most beautiful, blurry, melodic, disorientating and come on I have to say it, BLISSED OUT.

Kevin Shields provided his considerably unique guitar talents along with Belinda Butcher. They together did their extraordinary girl/boy vocal thing. The rhythm section was none too shabby either with the aforementioned Deb Googe on her heavy, dubby and sometimes pummelling bass. Colm O'Ciosoig provided the drums as well as occasional sampling/production/engineering duties.

It all began to come together in 1988 with the release of the You Made Me Realise EP and Feed Me With Your Kiss followed by the brilliant LP Isn’t Anything. My Bloody Valentine were on an incredible roll that turned into an avalanche with 1990’s Glider EP & 1991’s Tremolo EP followed by Loveless!

Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation may have taken rock to its furthest reaches but Loveless took it beyond the universe and even into un-rock regions ie. ambient and ultra vague dance-rock. This was future rock’s cherry on top. We thought ongoing sonic exploration of rock was to continue but this was it. Loveless has now become an almost melancholy sonic document, like modernist Russian architecture that’s now in ruins, because it was never bettered. Don’t let that get you down though because this is a hell of a peak for rock’s innovation to go out on.

Here come the cliches. Loveless was hazy sweet languidity with a noisy and chaotic undercurrent played with frenzied yet laconic enthusiasm. Like the band’s name suggested a conundrum was at work here, where apathy and hysteria were used to describe the same song. Deliriously indolent, what about listless exhilaration? One tends to forget this record also fucking rocked as well as swimming in oceans of intoxicating euphoria, sometimes all at once. Oh yeah, Loveless is also pop music at its finest. Ecstatic aural pleasure at its Zenith.

*This review was written for the HC website in maybe 2014(?)

WHEN YOU SLEEP

Words are very unnecessary...      

...but...

When You Sleep is blistering noise pop of the most excessively exuberant kind so astonishing its wooziness will leave you woozy.

TOUCHED

Someone once commented 'Why didn't they do a whole side of the sort of stuff like Touched and the in between track hazy ambient gear?'  That would have been cool.

ONLY SHALLOW

Best opening tune to an LP ever?

 

i ONLY SAID

HOLY SHIT! This still sound incredible in 2025. Still drowning in pools of euphoria and disorientating elastic psychedelia. 

COME IN ALONE

And you go here's another one just like the other one... it's ok... then hang on a fucking minute this might be the greatest My Bloody Valentine tune of all. Waves and waves of guitar elation with a gloriously disconcerting undertow. Mind melting. 

SOMETIMES

Then you go oh fuck I forgot about the unplugged lo-fi anthem Sometimes! How good is this. Can it get any more cozy than this deceptively low key jam as it infinitely progresses getting higher and higher and more and more hypnotic as it expands heavenwards. 

WHAT YOU WANT

Hang on, hang on I forgot about What You Want... now surely this is the best tune here. There's something melancholy about this one like you're having one last romantic liaison as your summer affair draws to a close. Breathtakingly dizzy like falling in a dream, so bittersweet and aberrant. 

Yes people forget, as the popularity of Loveless has somewhat unexpectedly soared over the last 34 years, that this is pretty fucking weird music. Often off colour and bizarre yet always retaining a potent effervescence if a bit claustrophobic.