#5 - Loveless

#5
Artist: My Bloody Valentine
Album: Loveless
Year of Release: 1991
Label: Sire

Much like with my post on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, I'm not sure what else there is to say about Loveless.  It is the defining My Bloody Valentine record and the defining shoegaze record and hell, maybe the defining record of the nineties (at least for nerds like me).  Every track is an absolute banger as the band shifts constantly between its high energy songs and its more ethereal sounds (some songs do both, too).  It's such an accomplishment of musical perfection that it took 22 years for Kevin Shields and company to release a proper follow-up.  And in spite of that impossible level of build up, the follow-up ended up being pretty good.  So in the spirit of my Aeroplane write-up, let's time travel again....but to the future.

February of 2013 was probably one of the most nothing times of my life.  I was right in the middle of my first tour of duty with Nationwide, in an extremely boring job that was still pleasant enough.  My kids weren't around yet but I was also past the more revelrous times of my early twenties.  And it was February, the most definitionally nondescript month.  So there was no better time to pore over every inch of m b v, which appeared almost out of nowhere one weekend.  I had yet to move past physical media at that time so I paid something ridiculous like $27 for the full package, which still allowed me to download the digital files so I could listen immediately.

Because I tend to savor "important" experiences like this, I only let myself listen to one new song per day.  This meant that over the first weekend I got through the "Sometimes" clone "She Found Now," the fuzzy guitar banquet of "Only Tomorrow," and the perfectly cromulent "Who Sees You."   A third of the way into the new album, it seemed like an acceptable imitation of Loveless.  Which is fine, if slightly disappointing.

But then things start to zag.  The next three tracks veer more into dream pop.  The vocals are still muted and the guitars in "New You" still do their thing, but in all this is a bit of an evolution.  And then comes the last third which takes a hard turn into noise rock.  It's still got some of the MBV trademarks to be sure, but at this point it's clear that the band was not content to stand still.  Taken as a whole, m b v shows how it's possible to follow-up something great.  It's not about repeating yourself or completely re-inventing your sound; rather it's about synthesizing both of these instincts and then refining the end product until you've found the thing you aspired to all along.  Not a bad trick.