Loveless is the second studio album by the Irish alternative rock band My Bloody Valentine. Released in November 1991, the album took two years to record at a number of studios with eleven engineers. Band leader Kevin Shields sought to achieve a particular sound for the record, and utilized such techniques as guitars strummed with a tremolo bar, sampled drum loops, and obscured vocals. The recording of Loveless is rumored to have cost £250,000, and it came close to bankrupting their record label Creation Records.

My Bloody Valentine's relationship with Creation deteriorated during the album's production, and the band was removed from the label after the album failed to perform commercially. Nonetheless, Loveless was well received by critics. Loveless is widely regarded as a landmark of the alternative rock genre, and is frequently cited by critics as one of the best albums of the 1990s. A number of rock musicians, including Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, have named the album as an influence on their music.

Album

Recording

Loveless was recorded over a two-year period between 1989 and 1991. The recording process was dominated by Shields; his final input during the recording was such that he said, "I'm actually the only musician on the record except for the Colm song." Googe observed, "At the beginning I used to go down [to the studio] most days but after a while I began to feel pretty superfluous so I went down less."^[1] A large number of engineers were hired and fired during the process, although the band finally gave credit to anyone present during the recordings, "even if all they did was make tea."^[2] Shields has since remarked that "these engineers—with the exception of Alan Moulder and later Anjali Dutt—were all just the people who came with the studio...everything we wanted to do was wrong, according to them."^[3] "It wasn't collaborative at all", according to Alan Moulder. "Kevin had a clear view of what he wanted, but he never explained it."^[4]

My Bloody Valentine were first scheduled at Blackwing Recording Studios in Southwark for the month of February 1989. When Shields realised Creation believed MBV could record an album "in five days", he panicked. He later recalled: "when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, they [Creation] freaked."^[5] After a number of unproductive weeks, the band relocated in September to the basement studio "The Elephant and Wapping", where they spent eight fruitless weeks. Moulder was the only engineer Shields trusted to perform tasks such as micing the amps; all the other credited engineers were told "We're so on top of this you don't even have to come to work."^[6]

During the spring of 1990, Anjali Dutt was hired to replace Moulder, who left to work with Shakespears Sister, and Ride. Dutt helped record vocal takes and some guitar tracks.^[7] Moulder returned to the project in August 1990 and was surprised by how little work had been completed. By that point Creation Records was becoming concerned about how much the album was costing the label.^[8] Moulder left for a second time in March 1991, to work for The Jesus and Mary Chain.^[9] The vocal tracks were taped in Britannia Row and Protocol studios between May and June 1991. This was the first time Butcher was involved in the recording of the album. Shields and Butcher hung curtains on the window between the studio control room and the vocal booth, and only communicated with the engineers when they would acknowledge a good take by opening the curtain and waving. According to engineer Gary Fixed: "We weren't allowed to listen while either of them were doing a vocal. You'd have to watch the meters on the tape machine to see if anyone was singing. If it stopped, you knew you had to stop the tape and take it back to the top." On most days, the couple arrived without having written the lyrics for the song there were to record. Anjali remembers: "Kevin would sing a track, and then Belinda would get the tape and write down words she thought he might have sung".^[10]

In July 1991, Creation agreed to relocate the production to Eastcoate studio, following unexplained complaints from Shields. However, the cash-poor Creation Records was unable to pay their bill for their time at Britannia Row, and the studio refused to return the band's equipment. According to Dutt: "I don't know what excuse Kevin gave them for leaving. He had to raise the money himself to get the gear out."^[11] Shields unexpected and random behaviour, the constant delays, and studio changes were having a material effect both on Creation's finances and the health of their staff. Dutt admits being desperate 'to leave', while second in command Dick Green had a nervous breakdown around this time. Green later recalled "It was two years into the album, and I phoned Shields up in tears. I was going 'You have to deliver me this record'."^[11] During this time, both Shields and Butcher became affected with tinnitus, and had to delay recording for a further number of weeks while they recovered. Concerned friends and band members suggested this was as a result of the unusually loud volumes MBV played at their gigs: "Ill-informed hysteria" according to Shields.^[11] Although Creation head Alan McGee was still upbeat and positive about his investment, the 29 year old Green, who by this time was opening the label's morning post "shaking with fear", became a concern to his co-workers. Publicist Laurence Verfaillie, aware of the label's inability to cover further studio bills, recalled Green's hair turning grey overnight: "He would have not gone grey if it was not for that album".^[11]

With the vocal tracks completed, a final mix was undertaken with the Irish engineer Dick Meany at the Church in Crouch End; the nineteenth studio in which Loveless had been worked on.Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page). The album was edited on an aged machine that have previously been used to cut together dialog for 1970s movies. Its computer threw the entire album out of phase. Shields was able to put it back together from memory, yet when it came to mastering the album, to Creation's dismay, he needed 13 days; rather than the usual one.^[12]

As the previously prolific MBV were unusually quiet, the UK music press began to speculate. Melody Maker calculated that the total recording cost had come close to £250,000; however, McGee, Green, and Shields dispute this. According to Shields: "The amount we spent nobody knows because we never counted. But we worked it out ourselves just by working out how much the studios cost and how much all the engineers cost. 160 thousand pounds was the most we could come to as the actual money that was spent." In Green's opinion the Melody Maker's estimate erred on the low side, by £20,000: "Once you'd even got it recorded and mixed, the very act of compiling, EQ-ing, etcetera too weeks on its own^[12] Shields later said that most of the money spent was the band's own money, and that "Creation probably spent fifteen to twenty thousand pounds of their own money on it, and that's it. They never showed us any accounts, and then they got bought out by Sony."^[13]

Reception

Following the album's low budget release, Shields remarked: "We know more about how the record industry works than our record company half the time. We do. I'm not joking."^[14] That winter the band toured Europe, with what the music critic David Cavanagh described as a "unique chapter in live music".^[14] To reach live the higher notes from Loveless, Shields employed an American flautist, Anna Quimbly. According to a friend of the band: "She had a little skirt on, black tights...she was a little indie girl. But when she blew into the flute, it was like fucking Woodstock".^[15] NME editor Danny Kelly attended a show he described as "more like torture than entertainment, I had a half pint of larger; they hit their first note and it was so loud that it sent the glass hurtling".^[15] A U.S. spring tour followed, during which Shields and Butcher tested their audiences' ability to sustain noise. The critic Mark Kemp said of the American tour of Loveless: "After about thirty seconds the adrenaline set in, people are screaming and shaking their fists. After a minute you wonder whats going on. After another minute it's total confusion. The noise starts hurting. The noise continues. After three minutes you begin to take deep breaths. After four minutes, a calm takes over."^[15]

Reviews of Loveless praised the album for its groundbreaking nature. NME awarded the album an 8 out of 10 score. Reviewer Dale Fadele saw My Bloody Valentine as the "blueprint" for the shoegaze genre, and wrote: "with 'Loveless' you could've expected the Irish / English partnership to succumb to self-parody or mimic The Scene That's Delighted To Eat Quiche [. . .] But no, 'Loveless' fires a silver-coated bullet into the future, daring all-comers to try and recreate its mixture of moods, feelings, emotion, styles and, yes, innovations." While Fadele expressed some disappointment that the group seemed to disassociate themselves from dance music and reggae basslines, he concluded "'Loveless' ups the ante, and, however decadent one might find the idea of elevating other human beings to deities, My Bloody Valentine, failings and all, deserve more than your respect."^[16] Rolling Stone gave the album four out of five stars. In a review that also covered Creation labelmates Chapterhouse and Velvet Crush, reviewer Ira Robbins wrote, "Despite the record's intense ability to disorient – this is real do-not-adjust-your-set stuff – the effect is strangely uplifting. Loveless oozes a sonic balm that first embraces and then softly pulverizes the frantic stress of life."^[17] The New York Times described Loveless as "an ear-baffling tour de force of symphonic chaos that wholly justifies Mr. Shields's contention that 'the electric guitar still contains an unexplored universe of noises.'"^[18]

Although Creation were pleased with the final album, and the initial music press reviews were positive, the label soon realised that although, in the words of plugger James Kyllo, "it was such a beautiful record, and it was wonderful to have it... it just didn't sound like a record that was going to recoup all the money that had been spent on it."^[19] McGee liked the record, but admitted: "It was quite clear that we could'nt bear the idea of going through that again, because there was just nothing to say that [Shields] wouldn't do exactly the same again. That's enough. Lets step back".^[19] Despite a severe shortage of money, Creation funded a short tour of the north of England late in 1991. At the time the band were making the marketing of Loveless a hard sell—there would be no singles, and the band's name was forbidden to appear on the record sleeve. McGee was by now exhausted and frustrated. He later admitted "I thought: I went to the wall for you. If this record bombs, I've stolen my father's money. And they were so...not understanding of anybody else's position."^[14] Loveless peaked at number twenty-four on the British album charts, and failed to chart in the United States, where it was distributed by Sire Records.^[20] In 2003 Rolling Stone estimated the sales figures for Loveless as 225,000 copies sold.^[21]

Loveless has ranked highly on a number of critics' lists. The album ranked number fourteen in the 1991 Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics' poll.^[22] In 1999, Pitchfork Media named Loveless the best album of the 1990s^[23] however, in their 2003 revision of the list, it moved to number two, swapping places with Radiohead's OK Computer.^[24] Template:RS500^[21] In Spin's entry for Loveless on its list of "100 Greatest Albums 1985-2005", Chuck Klosterman wrote, "Whenever anyone uses the phrase swirling guitars, this record is why. A testament to studio production and single-minded perfectionism, Loveless has a layered, inverted thickness that makes harsh sounds soft and fragile moments vast."^[4]

Music

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"Only Shallow"

"Only Shallow" is one of two songs on Loveless that featured live performance by drummer Colm O'Ciosoig.

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Loveless was largely recorded in mono sound.^[25] The album is recorded this way because Shields felt it important that the album's sound consisted of "the guitar smack bang in the middle and no chorus, no modulation effect".^[26] Shields wavers his guitar's tremolo bar as he strums, which contributes, in part, to the band's unique sound.^[27] Shields said that due to his use of the tremolo bar, "People were thinking it's hundreds of guitars, when it's actually got less guitar tracks than most people's demo tapes have."^[28]

The vocals, handled jointly by Shields and Bilinda Butcher, are kept relatively low in the mix, and are for the most part highly-pitched.^[29] According to Shields, because the band had spent so long working on the album's vocals, he "couldn't tolerate really clear vocals, where you just hear one voice", thus "it had to be more like a sound."^[30] The lyrics are deliberately obscure; Shields joked that he once considered rating various attempts to decipher the words on the band's website according to a percentage of accuracy.^[31]

While Butcher contributed about a third of the album's lyrics,^[32] most of the music was written and performed by Shields. All but two of the drum tracks are comprised of samples performed by drummer Colm O'Ciosoig. O'Ciosoig was suffering from physical and personal problems during the album's recording, and so various drum sounds that he was able to perform in his condition were sampled.^[33] Shields later remarked, "[i]t's exactly what Colm would have done, it just took longer to do."^[34] O'Ciosoig recovered enough to play live drums on two of the albums' songs, "Only Shallow" and "Touched", the latter of which was composed and performed entirely by the drummer.^[35] Debbie Googe did not perform during the album's recording, despite receiving a credit on the album sleeve. Butcher explained, "for Kevin to actually translate to Debbie what he had in his head and play it right would have been an agonizing process."^[36]

Legacy

Despite being poised for a "popular breakthrough" following Loveless' critical favour,^[37] My Bloody Valentine has recorded only sporadically since the album's release, including the contribution of a cover of a James Bond theme song to a charity compilation, and a cover of the Wire song "Map Ref. 41 Degrees N 93 Degrees W" for the tribute album Whore: Tribute to Wire. Unable to finalise a third album, Shields isolated himself and, in his own words, went "crazy"; drawing comparisons in the music press to the behavior of musicians such as Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd.^[38] The other band members went their own ways during the period of inactivity following Loveless; Googe formed the supergroup Snowpony in 1996^[39] and had also been sighted working as a cab driver in London,^[40] O'Ciosoig joined Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions,^[41] while Shields collaborated with Yo La Tengo, Primal Scream, and Dinosaur Jr.^[42]

Reportedly, two separate albums of new music were recorded by Shields in his home studio, but were abandoned.^[37] According to sources, one was possibly influenced by jungle music.^[40] Shields later confirmed that at least one full album of new material was abandoned: "We did an album's worth of half-finished stuff, and it did just get dumped, but it was worth dumping. It was dead. It hadn't got that spirit, that life in it."^[43] He later explained that: "I just stopped making records myself, and I suppose that must just seem weird to people. 'Why'd you do that?' The answer is, it wasn't as good [as Loveless]. And I always promised myself I'd never do that, put out a worse record."^[44] However, Shields later said to Magnet magazine that "We are 100 per cent going to make another My Bloody Valentine record unless we die or something," and attributed the band's sparse output to a lack of inspiration.^[45] In 2007 it was announced that the band had reunited and that a new album which the band had started recording in 1996 was "3/4th finished."^[46]

Loveless's influence has grown with time, and the album has impacted a wide variety of other artists. Music critic Jim DeRogatis wrote in Turn On Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock that "the forward-looking sounds of this unique disc have positioned the band as one of the most influential and inspiring bands since the Velvet Underground."^[47] Brian Eno has praised the album and said, regarding the song "Soon," that "[it] set a new standard for pop. It's the vaguest music ever to have been a hit."^[48] Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins told Spin, "It's rare in guitar-based music that somebody does something new [. . .] At the time, everybody was like, 'How the fuck are they doing this?' And, of course, it's way simpler than anybody would imagine."^[4] Trey Anastasio of jam band Phish opined that "'Loveless' is the best album recorded in the '90s," and wanted his band to cover the album in its entirety for a Halloween show.^[49] Robert Pollard of indie rock band Guided By Voices acknowledged the album as a source of inspiration, noting, "Sometimes when I want to write lyrics, I'll listen to Loveless. Because of the way the vocals are buried, you can almost listen to the songs as if they're instrumental pieces."^[29] Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails praised the album's musical diversity and production,^[50] and later worked with Moulder on the third Nine Inch Nails studio album, The Fragile.^[51] Loveless has also been said to have made a considerable influence on the career of British band Radiohead,^[49] particularly influencing the band's textured guitar sound.^[52] Instrumental band Japancakes covered the album in its entirety on Loveless (2007), replacing vocals with steel guitar and distortion with a clean sound.^[53]

Track listing

All songs written by Kevin Shields unless otherwise noted.

1. "Only Shallow" (Bilinda Butcher, Kevin Shields) – 4:17
2. "Loomer" (Butcher, Shields) – 2:38
3. "Touched" (Colm O'Ciosoig) – 0:56
4. "To Here Knows When" (Butcher, Shields) – 5:31
5. "When You Sleep" – 4:11
6. "I Only Said" – 5:34
7. "Come in Alone" – 3:58
8. "Sometimes" – 5:19
9. "Blown a Wish" (Butcher, Shields) – 3:36
10. "What You Want" – 5:33
11. "Soon" – 6:58

References

Sources

• Cavanagh, David (2000). My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize. (London) Virgin Books. ISBN 0-7535-0645-9.
• DeRogatis, Jim (2003). Turn On Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock. (Milwaukee) Hal Leonard Corporation. ISBN 0-634-05548-8.
• McGonigal, Mike (2007). Loveless. (New York) The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. ISBN 0-8264-1548-2.

External links

• Analysis of the use of noise as music in Loveless
• Analysis of the importance of Loveless in music history