.gif)
Loveless (album)
Encyclopedia
Loveless is the second studio album
by alternative rock
band My Bloody Valentine. Released on 4 November 1991, Loveless was recorded over a two-year period between 1989 and 1991 in nineteen recording studios. Lead vocalist and guitarist Kevin Shields
dominated the recording process; he sought to achieve a particular sound for the record, making use of various techniques such as guitars strummed with a tremolo bar, sampled drum loops, and obscured vocals. A large number of engineers were hired and fired during the process, although the band finally gave credit on the album sleeve to anyone who was present during the recordings, "even if all they did was make tea", according to Shields. The recording of Loveless is rumoured to have cost £250,000, a figure that came close to bankrupting the band's record label Creation Records
.
My Bloody Valentine's relationship with Creation Records deteriorated during the album's recording, and the band was removed from the label after the record's release due to the difficulty and expense of working with Shields. While Loveless did not achieve great commercial success, the album was well received by critics. Widely regarded as a landmark work of the shoegazing
genre, the record has been cited as an influence to several artists, and by critics as one of the best albums of the 1990s.
in Southwark
, London
for the month of February 1989, and intended to use the time to conceptualise a new, more studio-based sound for their second album. Shields said that Creation first believed the album could be recorded "in five days". According to Shields "when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, they [Creation] freaked." After several unproductive months, the band relocated in September to the basement studio The Elephant and Wapping, where they spent eight unproductive weeks. In-house engineer Nick Robbins said Shields made it clear from the outset that he (Robbins) "was just there to press the buttons." Robbins was quickly replaced by Harold Burgon, but according to Shields, Burgon's main contribution was to show the group how to use the in-studio computer. Burgon and Shields spent three weeks at the Woodcray studio in Berkshire
working on the Glider
EP
, which Shields and Creation owner Alan McGee
agreed would be released in advance of the album. Alan Moulder
was hired to mix the Glider song "Soon" at Trident 2 studio in Victoria (the song would reappear as the closing track on Loveless). Shields said of Moulder, "As soon as we worked with him we realized we'd love to some more!" When the group returned to work on the album Moulder was the sole engineer Shields trusted enough to perform tasks such as micing the amplifier
s; all the other credited engineers were told "We're so on top of this you don't even have to come to work." Shields has since stated 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."
During the spring of 1990, Anjali Dutt was hired to replace Moulder, who had left to work with the bands Shakespears Sister
and Ride
. Dutt assisted in the recording of vocals and several guitar tracks. During this period, the band recorded in various studios, often spending just a single day at a studio before deciding that it was unsuitable. In May 1990, My Bloody Valentine settled on Protocol in Holloway
as their primary location, and work began in earnest on the album, as well as a second EP, Tremolo
. Like Glider, Tremolo contained a song—"To Here Knows When"—that would later appear on Loveless. The band stopped recording during the summer of 1990 in order to tour in support of the release of Glider. When Moulder returned to the project in August, he was surprised by how little work had been completed. By that point Creation Records was concerned at how much the album was costing. Moulder left again in March 1991 to work for the noise pop
band The Jesus and Mary Chain
.
The vocal tracks were taped in Britannia Row and Protocol studios between May and June 1991. This was the first time vocalist Bilinda Butcher
was involved in the recording. 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 Guy Fixsen
, "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 they were to record. Dutt recalled: "Kevin would sing a track, and then Bilinda would get the tape and write down words she thought he might have sung".
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 the bill for their time at Britannia Row, and the studio refused to return the band's equipment. Dutt recalled, "I don't know what excuse Kevin gave them for leaving. He had to raise the money himself to get the gear out." 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 later admitted being desperate to leave the project, while Creation's 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'." 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 a result of the unusually loud volumes the group played at their shows. Shields dismissed these concerns as "Ill-informed hysteria". Although 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", Verfaillie said.
With the vocal tracks completed, a final mix of the album was undertaken with engineer Dick Meany at the Church in Crouch End
during the autumn of 1991; it was the nineteenth studio in which Loveless had been worked on. The album was edited on an aged machine that had previously been used to cut together dialog for movies in the 1970s. 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 day.
As the previously prolific band 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. Shields argued that that estimated cost (and Creation's near-bankruptcy) was a myth exaggerated by McGee because the Creation owner "thought it would be cool." 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. He said, "Once you'd even got it recorded and mixed, the very act of compiling, EQ-ing, etcetera took weeks on its own." In a December 1991 interview, Shields said that most of the money claimed to have been spent on the album was simply "money to live on" over three years, with the album itself only costing "a few thousand". He also claimed that the album represented only four months work over two years. 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
."
did not perform on the album, though she received a credit on the album sleeve. Googe said, "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." 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." "It wasn't collaborative at all", Alan Moulder said of the album's recording. "Kevin had a clear view of what he wanted, but he never explained it."
Loveless was largely recorded in mono
sound, as Shields felt it important that the album's sound consisted of "the guitar smack bang in the middle and no chorus, no modulation effect". Shields wavers his guitar's tremolo bar as he strum
s, which contributes, in part, to the band's distinctive sound. This technique—nicknamed "Glide guitar"—causes the guitar strings to bend slightly in and out of tune. 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." The guitarist asserted that unlike other bands of the shoegazing
movement of the early 1990s, My Bloody Valentine did not use chorus or flanger pedals. He insisted, "No other band played that guitar like me [...] We did everything solely with the tremolo arm". Shields aimed to use "very simple minimal effects" which often were the result of involved studio work. He stated, "The songs are really simply structured. A lot of them are purposely like that. That way you can get away with a lot more when you mess around with the contents". In a 1992 Guitar World
interview, Shields described how he achieved a sound akin to a wah-wah pedal
on "I Only Said" by playing his guitar through an amplifier with a graphic equaliser preamp. After recording the track, he then bounced it to another track through a parametric equaliser while he adjusted the EQ levels manually. The interviewer asked if Shields could have achieved the same effect easier by simply using a wah-wah pedal, to which the guitarist replied, "In attitude toward sound, yes. But not in approach."
All but two of the drum tracks are composed of samples performed by drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig. Because Ó Cíosóig was suffering from physical and personal problems during the album's recording, samples of various drum patterns that he was able to perform in his condition were recorded. According to Shields, "[i]t's exactly what Colm would have done, it just took longer to do." Ó Cíosóig recovered enough to play live on two of the albums' songs, "Only Shallow" and "Touched", the latter of which was composed and performed entirely by the drummer. Shields believes that listeners are unable to tell the difference between Ó Cíosóig's live drumming and the drum loops aside from the tracks intended to have an obviously "sampled" sound, like the dance-oriented "Soon". The album makes extensive use of samples, with Shields stating, "Most of the samples are feedback. We learnt from guitar feedback, with lots of distortion, that you can make any instrument, any one that you can imagine".
The vocals, handled jointly by Shields and Butcher, are kept relatively low in the mix, and are for the most part highly-pitched. On occasion Shields sang the higher register and Butcher the lower one. 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." Butcher explained her "dreamy, sensual" style vocals, saying, "Often when we do vocals, it's 7:30 in the morning; I've usually just fallen asleep and have to be woken up to sing." To aid this effect, Shields and Ó Cíosóig even sampled Butcher's voice and reused it as instrumentation. The layered vocals on "When You Sleep" were borne out of frustration with trying to get the right take, Shields saying "The vocals sound like that because it became boring and too destructive trying to get the right vocal. So I decided to put all the vocals in" (it had been sung 12 or 13 times). 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. He claims that he and Butcher "spent way more time on the lyrics than ever on the music". The words were often written in late-night eight to ten hour-long sessions before the pair were due to record the vocals. The pair worked diligently to ensure the lyrics were not lackluster, even though few changes actually resulted; Shields said, "There's nothing worse than bad lyrics."
". NME
editor Danny Kelly
attended a show he described as "more like torture than entertainment, I had a half pint of lager; they hit their first note and it was so loud that it sent the glass hurtling". A U.S. spring tour followed, during which Shields and Butcher tested their audiences' ability to sustain noise played at high volumes. Critic Mark Kemp
said of the American tour, "After about thirty seconds the adrenaline set in, people are screaming and shaking their fists. After a minute you wonder what's 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." The tour saw My Bloody Valentine accused of criminal negligence by the music press, who took exception to the long period of extreme noise played during You Made Me Realise, referring to it as "the holocaust". In December 2000 Mojo
magazine rated the tour as the second loudest in history.
Although Shields feared a critical panning, reviews of Loveless were almost unanimous with praise. NME awarded the album an eight out of ten score. Reviewer Dele 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." Melody Maker writer Simon Reynolds
praised the album, and wrote that Loveless "[reaffirms] how unique, how peerless MBV are." He declared, "Along with Mercury Rev
's 'Yerself is Steam
', 'Loveless' is the outermost, innermost, uttermost rock record of 1991." Reynolds noted that his only criticism was that "while My Bloody Valentine have amplified and refined what they already were, they've failed to mutate or leap into any kind of beyond." Rolling Stone
gave the album four out of five stars. In a review that also covered Chapterhouse
and Creation labelmates 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." Spin
gave Loveless a mixed review with writer Jim Greer noting that the album's songs are "standard-sh and dull" and concluded that he felt "The warped music is a cool idea and I recommend the album—but not on the basis of the singing or the songs".
While 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." Alan McGee liked the record, but admitted, "It was quite clear that we couldn't 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". 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 difficult—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 recalled, "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." McGee dropped My Bloody Valentine from Creation soon after the album's release because he could not bear working with Shields again; "It was either him or me", he told The Guardian
in 2004. Loveless peaked at number 24 on the UK Albums Chart
, and failed to chart in the United States, where it was distributed by Sire Records
. In 2003 Rolling Stone estimated the sales figures for Loveless as 225,000 copies sold.
Loveless has ranked highly on a number of critics' lists. The album ranked number fourteen in the 1991 Village Voice Pazz & Jop
critics' poll. In 1999, Pitchfork Media
named Loveless the best album of the 1990s. However, in their 2003 revision of the list, it moved to number two, swapping places with Radiohead
's OK Computer
. In 2003, the album was ranked number 219 on Rolling Stone
magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time
. In 2004 The Observer
ranked it at number 20 in its "100 Greatest British Albums" list, declaring it "the last great extreme rock album". In Spin's entry for Loveless on its list of "100 Greatest Albums 1985-2005" (where it was ranked at number 22), 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." In 2008 Loveless topped The Irish Times
"Greatest Irish Album" list.
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
. The other band members went their own ways during the period of inactivity following Loveless: Butcher contributed vocals to Collapsed Lung's
1996 single "Board Game", Googe had been sighted working as a cab driver in London
and formed the supergroup
Snowpony
in 1996, Ó Cíosóig joined Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions
, while Shields collaborated with Yo La Tengo
, Primal Scream
, and Dinosaur Jr
.
Reportedly, two separate albums of new music were recorded by Shields in his home studio, but were abandoned. According to sources, one was possibly influenced by jungle music
. Shields later confirmed that at least one full album of new material was abandoned. He said, "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." He later explained, "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." However, Shields later said to Magnet
magazine, "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. In 2007 Shields announced that the band had reunited and that a new album they had started recording in 1996 was "3/4th finished."
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
." Brian Eno
has praised the album and said, regarding the song "Soon", that "[i]t set a new standard for pop
. It's the vaguest music ever to have been a hit." Robert Smith
of The Cure
discovered Loveless after a period of almost exclusively listening to "disco
, or Irish bands like the Dubliners
" as a means of avoiding his contemporaries, and said, "[My Bloody Valentine] was the first band I heard who quite clearly pissed all over us, and their album Loveless is certainly one of my all-time three favourite records. It's the sound of someone [Shields] who is so driven that they're demented. And the fact that they spent so much time and money on it is so excellent." 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." Corgan later recruited Alan Moulder to co-produce the Pumpkins' album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
(1995). Trent Reznor
of Nine Inch Nails
, who praised the album's musical diversity and production, also worked with Moulder on the third Nine Inch Nails studio album, The Fragile
. Trey Anastasio
of jam band
Phish
believed that "Loveless [was] the best album recorded in the '90s", and wanted his band to cover the album in its entirety for a Halloween
show. 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." Loveless has also been said to have made a considerable influence on the career of British band Radiohead
, particularly influencing the band's textured guitar sound. Instrumental band Japancakes
covered the album in its entirety on Loveless (2007), replacing vocals with steel guitar
and distortion with a clean sound.
unless otherwise noted.
Studio album
A studio album is an album made up of tracks recorded in the controlled environment of a recording studio. A studio album contains newly written and recorded or previously unreleased or remixed material, distinguishing itself from a compilation or reissue album of previously recorded material, or...
by alternative rock
Alternative rock
Alternative rock is a genre of rock music and a term used to describe a diverse musical movement that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1980s and became widely popular by the 1990s...
band My Bloody Valentine. Released on 4 November 1991, Loveless was recorded over a two-year period between 1989 and 1991 in nineteen recording studios. Lead vocalist and guitarist Kevin Shields
Kevin Shields
Kevin Patrick Shields is an American-born, Irish vocalist, guitarist, and producer of alternative rock band My Bloody Valentine....
dominated the recording process; he sought to achieve a particular sound for the record, making use of various techniques such as guitars strummed with a tremolo bar, sampled drum loops, and obscured vocals. A large number of engineers were hired and fired during the process, although the band finally gave credit on the album sleeve to anyone who was present during the recordings, "even if all they did was make tea", according to Shields. The recording of Loveless is rumoured to have cost £250,000, a figure that came close to bankrupting the band's record label Creation Records
Creation Records
Creation Records was a British independent record label headed by Alan McGee. Along with Dick Green and Joe Foster, McGee founded Creation in 1983. The label lasted until its demise in 1999. The name came from the 1960s band The Creation , whom McGee greatly admired. McGee, Green and Foster were...
.
My Bloody Valentine's relationship with Creation Records deteriorated during the album's recording, and the band was removed from the label after the record's release due to the difficulty and expense of working with Shields. While Loveless did not achieve great commercial success, the album was well received by critics. Widely regarded as a landmark work of the shoegazing
Shoegazing
Shoegazing is a subgenre of alternative rock that emerged from the United Kingdom in the late 1980s. It lasted there until the mid 1990s, with a critical zenith reached in 1990 and 1991...
genre, the record has been cited as an influence to several artists, and by critics as one of the best albums of the 1990s.
Recording and production
My Bloody Valentine were scheduled to record at Blackwing StudiosBlackwing Studios
Blackwing Studios was an English recording studio, most notable for early Depeche Mode and Yazoo recordings in the early 1980s.-Background:The Blackwing Studios complex was housed inside a deconsecrated church in South-East London. All Hallows church was partly destroyed during The Blitz in 1941...
in Southwark
Southwark
Southwark is a district of south London, England, and the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Southwark. Situated east of Charing Cross, it forms one of the oldest parts of London and fronts the River Thames to the north...
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
for the month of February 1989, and intended to use the time to conceptualise a new, more studio-based sound for their second album. Shields said that Creation first believed the album could be recorded "in five days". According to Shields "when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, they [Creation] freaked." After several unproductive months, the band relocated in September to the basement studio The Elephant and Wapping, where they spent eight unproductive weeks. In-house engineer Nick Robbins said Shields made it clear from the outset that he (Robbins) "was just there to press the buttons." Robbins was quickly replaced by Harold Burgon, but according to Shields, Burgon's main contribution was to show the group how to use the in-studio computer. Burgon and Shields spent three weeks at the Woodcray studio in Berkshire
Berkshire
Berkshire is a historic county in the South of England. It is also often referred to as the Royal County of Berkshire because of the presence of the royal residence of Windsor Castle in the county; this usage, which dates to the 19th century at least, was recognised by the Queen in 1957, and...
working on the Glider
Glider (EP)
Glider is an EP by My Bloody Valentine, released in April 1990 by Creation Records. The EP was also the group's first release on the Sire Records label in the USA. The lead track, "Soon", was later included on the Loveless album.-First 12-inch:...
EP
Extended play
An EP is a musical recording which contains more music than a single, but is too short to qualify as a full album or LP. The term EP originally referred only to specific types of vinyl records other than 78 rpm standard play records and LP records, but it is now applied to mid-length Compact...
, which Shields and Creation owner Alan McGee
Alan McGee
Alan McGee has been a record label owner, musician, manager, and music blogger for The Guardian.McGee is best-known for co-forming and running the independent Creation Records label from 1983–1999, and then Poptones from 1999-2007...
agreed would be released in advance of the album. Alan Moulder
Alan Moulder
Alan Moulder is one of Britain's premier alternative rock record producers. He has worked with such artists as Depeche Mode, Erasure, Elastica, Gary Numan, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Curve, Ride, Lush and My Bloody Valentine, Lostprophets, Shihad, Ivyrise and Placebo, as well as with many American...
was hired to mix the Glider song "Soon" at Trident 2 studio in Victoria (the song would reappear as the closing track on Loveless). Shields said of Moulder, "As soon as we worked with him we realized we'd love to some more!" When the group returned to work on the album Moulder was the sole engineer Shields trusted enough to perform tasks such as micing the amplifier
Amplifier
Generally, an amplifier or simply amp, is a device for increasing the power of a signal.In popular use, the term usually describes an electronic amplifier, in which the input "signal" is usually a voltage or a current. In audio applications, amplifiers drive the loudspeakers used in PA systems to...
s; all the other credited engineers were told "We're so on top of this you don't even have to come to work." Shields has since stated 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."
Shakespears Sister
Shakespears Sister/Shakespear's Sister is a British-based synth-pop-rock band formed by Irish-born singer–songwriter Siobhan Fahey in 1988, with plaudits including a BRIT Award and Ivor Novello Award. It was Fahey's first musical outing since leaving Bananarama, and initially a solo project...
and Ride
Ride (band)
Ride were a British alternative rock band that formed in 1988 in Oxford, England, consisting of Andy Bell, Mark Gardener, Laurence "Loz" Colbert, and Steve Queralt. The band were initially part of the "shoegazing" scene. Following the break-up of the band in 1996, members moved on to various other...
. Dutt assisted in the recording of vocals and several guitar tracks. During this period, the band recorded in various studios, often spending just a single day at a studio before deciding that it was unsuitable. In May 1990, My Bloody Valentine settled on Protocol in Holloway
Holloway, London
Holloway is an inner-city district in the London Borough of Islington located north of Charing Cross and follows for the most part, the line of the Holloway Road . At the centre of Holloway is the Nag's Head area...
as their primary location, and work began in earnest on the album, as well as a second EP, Tremolo
Tremolo (EP)
Tremolo is an EP by My Bloody Valentine, released in February 1991 by Creation Records. The title is a reference to the band's heavy usage of guitar tremolo and vibrato to create blurred, dreamlike tones...
. Like Glider, Tremolo contained a song—"To Here Knows When"—that would later appear on Loveless. The band stopped recording during the summer of 1990 in order to tour in support of the release of Glider. When Moulder returned to the project in August, he was surprised by how little work had been completed. By that point Creation Records was concerned at how much the album was costing. Moulder left again in March 1991 to work for the noise pop
Noise pop
Noise pop is a subgenre of alternative rock developed in the mid 1980s in the UK and US, that mixes atonal noise or feedback, or both, with the melodic instrumentation and production elements more often found in pop music, making it more melodic and angst-free than noise rock.-History:Noise pop has...
band The Jesus and Mary Chain
The Jesus and Mary Chain
The Jesus and Mary Chain are a Scottish alternative rock band formed in East Kilbride, Glasgow in 1983. The band revolves around the songwriting partnership of brothers Jim and William Reid...
.
The vocal tracks were taped in Britannia Row and Protocol studios between May and June 1991. This was the first time vocalist Bilinda Butcher
Bilinda Butcher
Bilinda Jayne Butcher is a vocalist/guitarist for the rock band My Bloody Valentine.-Biography:Butcher was raised in London and then Derbyshire. She went on to study dance at Laban College in London, but she dropped out after a year due to developing a case of cystitis...
was involved in the recording. 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 Guy Fixsen
Guy Fixsen
Guy Fixsen is a producer/engineer/musician based in London. He is best-known for his producing/engineering work with various indie rock, shoegazer, and experimental rock bands, and for forming the band Laika....
, "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 they were to record. Dutt recalled: "Kevin would sing a track, and then Bilinda would get the tape and write down words she thought he might have sung".
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 the bill for their time at Britannia Row, and the studio refused to return the band's equipment. Dutt recalled, "I don't know what excuse Kevin gave them for leaving. He had to raise the money himself to get the gear out." 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 later admitted being desperate to leave the project, while Creation's 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'." During this time, both Shields and Butcher became affected with tinnitus
Tinnitus
Tinnitus |ringing]]") is the perception of sound within the human ear in the absence of corresponding external sound.Tinnitus is not a disease, but a symptom that can result from a wide range of underlying causes: abnormally loud sounds in the ear canal for even the briefest period , ear...
, and had to delay recording for a further number of weeks while they recovered. Concerned friends and band members suggested this was a result of the unusually loud volumes the group played at their shows. Shields dismissed these concerns as "Ill-informed hysteria". Although 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", Verfaillie said.
With the vocal tracks completed, a final mix of the album was undertaken with engineer Dick Meany at the Church in Crouch End
Crouch End
Crouch End is an area of north London, in the London Borough of Haringey.- Location :Crouch End is in a valley between Harringay to the east, Hornsey, Muswell Hill and Wood Green to the north, Finsbury Park and Archway to the south and Highgate to the west...
during the autumn of 1991; it was the nineteenth studio in which Loveless had been worked on. The album was edited on an aged machine that had previously been used to cut together dialog for movies in the 1970s. 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 day.
As the previously prolific band were unusually quiet, the UK music press began to speculate. Melody Maker
Melody Maker
Melody Maker, published in the United Kingdom, was, according to its publisher IPC Media, the world's oldest weekly music newspaper. It was founded in 1926 as a magazine targeted at musicians; in 2000 it was merged into "long-standing rival" New Musical Express.-1950s–1960s:Originally the Melody...
calculated that the total recording cost had come close to £250,000; however, McGee, Green, and Shields dispute this. Shields argued that that estimated cost (and Creation's near-bankruptcy) was a myth exaggerated by McGee because the Creation owner "thought it would be cool." 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. He said, "Once you'd even got it recorded and mixed, the very act of compiling, EQ-ing, etcetera took weeks on its own." In a December 1991 interview, Shields said that most of the money claimed to have been spent on the album was simply "money to live on" over three years, with the album itself only costing "a few thousand". He also claimed that the album represented only four months work over two years. 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
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
."
Music
While Butcher contributed about a third of the album's lyrics, most of the music on Loveless was written and performed by Shields. Shields stated, "I'm actually the only musician on the record except for the Colm song ['Touched']." Shields assumed Butcher's guitarist duties during the recording process; Butcher admitted that she had not minded because she felt she "was never a great guitarist". Bassist Debbie GoogeDebbie Googe
Debbie Googe is the bassist for the rock band My Bloody Valentine.-My Bloody Valentine:Before joining My Bloody Valentine, she lived in Yeovil, Somerset and played for a band called Bikini Mutants, who gigged with The Mob...
did not perform on the album, though she received a credit on the album sleeve. Googe said, "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." 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." "It wasn't collaborative at all", Alan Moulder said of the album's recording. "Kevin had a clear view of what he wanted, but he never explained it."
Loveless was largely recorded in mono
Monaural
Monaural or monophonic sound reproduction is single-channel. Typically there is only one microphone, one loudspeaker, or channels are fed from a common signal path...
sound, as Shields felt it important that the album's sound consisted of "the guitar smack bang in the middle and no chorus, no modulation effect". Shields wavers his guitar's tremolo bar as he strum
Strum
In music, a strum or stroke is an action where a single surface touches several strings of a string instrument, such as a guitar, in order to set them all into motion and thereby play a chord...
s, which contributes, in part, to the band's distinctive sound. This technique—nicknamed "Glide guitar"—causes the guitar strings to bend slightly in and out of tune. 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." The guitarist asserted that unlike other bands of the shoegazing
Shoegazing
Shoegazing is a subgenre of alternative rock that emerged from the United Kingdom in the late 1980s. It lasted there until the mid 1990s, with a critical zenith reached in 1990 and 1991...
movement of the early 1990s, My Bloody Valentine did not use chorus or flanger pedals. He insisted, "No other band played that guitar like me [...] We did everything solely with the tremolo arm". Shields aimed to use "very simple minimal effects" which often were the result of involved studio work. He stated, "The songs are really simply structured. A lot of them are purposely like that. That way you can get away with a lot more when you mess around with the contents". In a 1992 Guitar World
Guitar World
Guitar World is a monthly music magazine devoted to guitarists. It contains original interviews, album and gear reviews and guitar and bass tablature of approximately five songs each month. The magazine is published 13 times per year...
interview, Shields described how he achieved a sound akin to a wah-wah pedal
Wah-wah pedal
A wah-wah pedal is a type of guitar effects pedal that alters the tone of the signal to create a distinctive effect, mimicking the human voice...
on "I Only Said" by playing his guitar through an amplifier with a graphic equaliser preamp. After recording the track, he then bounced it to another track through a parametric equaliser while he adjusted the EQ levels manually. The interviewer asked if Shields could have achieved the same effect easier by simply using a wah-wah pedal, to which the guitarist replied, "In attitude toward sound, yes. But not in approach."
All but two of the drum tracks are composed of samples performed by drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig. Because Ó Cíosóig was suffering from physical and personal problems during the album's recording, samples of various drum patterns that he was able to perform in his condition were recorded. According to Shields, "[i]t's exactly what Colm would have done, it just took longer to do." Ó Cíosóig recovered enough to play live on two of the albums' songs, "Only Shallow" and "Touched", the latter of which was composed and performed entirely by the drummer. Shields believes that listeners are unable to tell the difference between Ó Cíosóig's live drumming and the drum loops aside from the tracks intended to have an obviously "sampled" sound, like the dance-oriented "Soon". The album makes extensive use of samples, with Shields stating, "Most of the samples are feedback. We learnt from guitar feedback, with lots of distortion, that you can make any instrument, any one that you can imagine".
The vocals, handled jointly by Shields and Butcher, are kept relatively low in the mix, and are for the most part highly-pitched. On occasion Shields sang the higher register and Butcher the lower one. 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." Butcher explained her "dreamy, sensual" style vocals, saying, "Often when we do vocals, it's 7:30 in the morning; I've usually just fallen asleep and have to be woken up to sing." To aid this effect, Shields and Ó Cíosóig even sampled Butcher's voice and reused it as instrumentation. The layered vocals on "When You Sleep" were borne out of frustration with trying to get the right take, Shields saying "The vocals sound like that because it became boring and too destructive trying to get the right vocal. So I decided to put all the vocals in" (it had been sung 12 or 13 times). 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. He claims that he and Butcher "spent way more time on the lyrics than ever on the music". The words were often written in late-night eight to ten hour-long sessions before the pair were due to record the vocals. The pair worked diligently to ensure the lyrics were not lackluster, even though few changes actually resulted; Shields said, "There's nothing worse than bad lyrics."
Release and reception
Following the album's low budget release, Shields boasted, "We know more about how the record industry works than our record company half the time. We do. I'm not joking." That winter the band toured Europe, an event music critic David Cavanagh described as a "unique chapter in live music". To recreate the higher tones from Loveless, Shields employed American flautist Anna Quimby. 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 WoodstockWoodstock Festival
Woodstock Music & Art Fair was a music festival, billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music". It was held at Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm in the Catskills near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York, from August 15 to August 18, 1969...
". NME
NME
The New Musical Express is a popular music publication in the United Kingdom, published weekly since March 1952. It started as a music newspaper, and gradually moved toward a magazine format during the 1980s, changing from newsprint in 1998. It was the first British paper to include a singles...
editor Danny Kelly
Danny Kelly (journalist)
Danny Kelly is a music journalist, sports presenter and internet publisher. He is the former editor of the music weekly New Musical Express....
attended a show he described as "more like torture than entertainment, I had a half pint of lager; they hit their first note and it was so loud that it sent the glass hurtling". A U.S. spring tour followed, during which Shields and Butcher tested their audiences' ability to sustain noise played at high volumes. Critic Mark Kemp
Mark Kemp
Mark Kemp is an American music journalist and author. A graduate of East Carolina University, he has served as music editor of Rolling Stone and vice president of music editorial for MTV Networks...
said of the American tour, "After about thirty seconds the adrenaline set in, people are screaming and shaking their fists. After a minute you wonder what's 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." The tour saw My Bloody Valentine accused of criminal negligence by the music press, who took exception to the long period of extreme noise played during You Made Me Realise, referring to it as "the holocaust". In December 2000 Mojo
Mojo (magazine)
MOJO is a popular music magazine published initially by Emap, and since January 2008 by Bauer, monthly in the United Kingdom. Following the success of the magazine Q, publishers Emap were looking for a title which would cater for the burgeoning interest in classic rock music...
magazine rated the tour as the second loudest in history.
Although Shields feared a critical panning, reviews of Loveless were almost unanimous with praise. NME awarded the album an eight out of ten score. Reviewer Dele 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
Dance music
Dance music is music composed specifically to facilitate or accompany dancing. It can be either a whole musical piece or part of a larger musical arrangement...
and reggae
Reggae
Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...
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." Melody Maker writer Simon Reynolds
Simon Reynolds
Simon Reynolds is an English music critic who is well-known for his writings on electronic dance music and for coining the term "post-rock". Besides electronic dance music, Reynolds has written about a wide range of artists and musical genres, and has written books on post-punk and rock...
praised the album, and wrote that Loveless "[reaffirms] how unique, how peerless MBV are." He declared, "Along with Mercury Rev
Mercury Rev
Mercury Rev is an American alternative rock group, that formed in the late 1980s in Buffalo, New York. Original personnel were David Baker , Jonathan Donahue , Sean Mackowiak, a.k.a...
's 'Yerself is Steam
Yerself Is Steam
Yerself is Steam is the 1991 debut album by Mercury Rev. The title is a malapropism of the phrase "Your self-esteem," and is taken from a recurring lyric in the opening "Chasing a Bee." "Car Wash Hair" was released as a single before the album...
', 'Loveless' is the outermost, innermost, uttermost rock record of 1991." Reynolds noted that his only criticism was that "while My Bloody Valentine have amplified and refined what they already were, they've failed to mutate or leap into any kind of beyond." Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
gave the album four out of five stars. In a review that also covered Chapterhouse
Chapterhouse
For the religious buildings, see Chapter houseChapterhouse are a British shoegazing band originally of the early 1990s, from Reading, Berkshire, England. Formed in 1987 by Andrew Sherriff and Stephen Patman, the band began performing alongside Spacemen 3...
and Creation labelmates Velvet Crush
Velvet Crush
Velvet Crush is a power pop band from Rhode Island that achieved prominence in indie-rock circles in the early- and mid-1990s. The band broke up in 1996 but re-formed in 1998 and have continued to record, releasing their most recent album in 2004...
, 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." Spin
Spin (magazine)
Spin is a music magazine founded in 1985 by publisher Bob Guccione Jr.-History:In its early years, the magazine was noted for its broad music coverage with an emphasis on college-oriented rock music and on the ongoing emergence of hip-hop. The magazine was eclectic and bold, if sometimes haphazard...
gave Loveless a mixed review with writer Jim Greer noting that the album's songs are "standard-sh and dull" and concluded that he felt "The warped music is a cool idea and I recommend the album—but not on the basis of the singing or the songs".
While 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." Alan McGee liked the record, but admitted, "It was quite clear that we couldn't 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". 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 difficult—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 recalled, "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." McGee dropped My Bloody Valentine from Creation soon after the album's release because he could not bear working with Shields again; "It was either him or me", he told The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
in 2004. Loveless peaked at number 24 on the UK Albums Chart
UK Albums Chart
The UK Albums Chart is a list of albums ranked by physical and digital sales in the United Kingdom. It is compiled every week by The Official Charts Company and broadcast on a Sunday on BBC Radio 1 , and published in Music Week magazine and on the OCC website .To qualify for the UK albums chart...
, and failed to chart in the United States, where it was distributed by Sire Records
Sire Records
Sire Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group and distributed through Warner Bros. Records.-Beginnings:The label was founded in 1966 as Sire Productions by Seymour Stein and Richard Gottehrer, each investing ten thousand dollars into the new company. Its early releases as a...
. In 2003 Rolling Stone estimated the sales figures for Loveless as 225,000 copies sold.
Loveless has ranked highly on a number of critics' lists. The album ranked number fourteen in the 1991 Village Voice Pazz & Jop
Pazz & Jop
The Pazz & Jop critics' poll is a poll of music critics run by The Village Voice newspaper. It is compiled every year from the top ten lists of hundreds of music critics...
critics' poll. In 1999, Pitchfork Media
Pitchfork Media
Pitchfork Media, usually known simply as Pitchfork or P4k, is a Chicago-based daily Internet publication established in 1995 that is devoted to music criticism and commentary, music news, and artist interviews. Its focus is on underground and independent music, especially indie rock...
named Loveless the best album of the 1990s. However, in their 2003 revision of the list, it moved to number two, swapping places with Radiohead
Radiohead
Radiohead are an English rock band from Abingdon, Oxfordshire, formed in 1985. The band consists of Thom Yorke , Jonny Greenwood , Ed O'Brien , Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway .Radiohead released their debut single "Creep" in 1992...
's OK Computer
OK Computer
OK Computer is the third studio album by the English alternative rock band Radiohead, released on 16 June 1997 on Parlophone in the UK and 1 July 1997 by Capitol Records in the US. It marks a deliberate attempt by the band to move away from the introspective guitar-oriented sound of their previous...
. In 2003, the album was ranked number 219 on Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
"The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" is the title of a 2003 special issue of American magazine Rolling Stone, and a related book published in 2005.Related news articles:...
. In 2004 The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
ranked it at number 20 in its "100 Greatest British Albums" list, declaring it "the last great extreme rock album". In Spin's entry for Loveless on its list of "100 Greatest Albums 1985-2005" (where it was ranked at number 22), Chuck Klosterman
Chuck Klosterman
Charles John "Chuck" Klosterman is an American author and essayist who has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and The Washington Post, and has written books focusing on American popular culture....
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." In 2008 Loveless topped The Irish Times
The Irish Times
The Irish Times is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper launched on 29 March 1859. The editor is Kevin O'Sullivan who succeeded Geraldine Kennedy in 2011; the deputy editor is Paul O'Neill. The Irish Times is considered to be Ireland's newspaper of record, and is published every day except Sundays...
"Greatest Irish Album" list.
Legacy
Despite being poised for a "popular breakthrough" following Loveless critical favour, My Bloody Valentine have recorded only sporadically since the album's release, including the contribution of a cover of a James BondJames Bond
James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...
theme song to a charity compilation, and a cover of the Wire
Wire (band)
Wire are an English rock band, formed in London in October 1976 by Colin Newman , Graham Lewis , Bruce Gilbert , and Robert Gotobed...
song "Map Ref. 41 Degrees N 93 Degrees W" for the tribute album
Tribute album
A tribute album is a recorded collection of cover versions of songs or instrumental compositions. Its concept may be either various artists making a tribute to a single artist, a single artist making a tribute to various artists, or a single artist making a tribute to another single artist.There...
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
Brian Wilson
Brian Douglas Wilson is an American musician, best known as the leader and chief songwriter of the group The Beach Boys. Within the band, Wilson played bass and keyboards, also providing part-time lead vocals and, more often, backing vocals, harmonizing in falsetto with the group...
of The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys are an American rock band, formed in 1961 in Hawthorne, California. The group was initially composed of brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and friend Al Jardine. Managed by the Wilsons' father Murry, The Beach Boys signed to Capitol Records in 1962...
and Syd Barrett
Syd Barrett
Syd Barrett , born Roger Keith Barrett, was an English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and painter, best remembered as a founding member of the band Pink Floyd. He was the lead vocalist, guitarist and primary songwriter during the band's psychedelic years, providing major musical and stylistic...
of Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd were an English rock band that achieved worldwide success with their progressive and psychedelic rock music. Their work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album art, and elaborate live shows. Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially...
. The other band members went their own ways during the period of inactivity following Loveless: Butcher contributed vocals to Collapsed Lung's
Collapsed Lung (band)
Collapsed Lung are a Harlow-based Brit-Pop group most famous for the song "Eat My Goal". They formed in February 1992.-History:Collapsed Lung was originally formed as a bedroom studio collaboration between Anthony Chapman and Steve Harcourt...
1996 single "Board Game", Googe had been sighted working as a cab driver in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
and formed the supergroup
Supergroup (music)
In the late 1960s, the term supergroup was coined to describe "a rock music group whose performers are already famous from having performed individually or in other groups"....
Snowpony
Snowpony
Snowpony are a British indie rock supergroup initially formed in 1996 by Katharine Gifford and Debbie Googe.-History:Gifford, who at the time was in Moonshake, gave Googe a tape of songs she had been working on before Moonshake went on a US tour. Googe, who then had recently left My Bloody...
in 1996, Ó Cíosóig joined Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions
Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions
Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions is an independent alternative/dream pop band composed of Hope Sandoval from the dormant band Mazzy Star and Colm Ó Cíosóig of My Bloody Valentine. Their first album Bavarian Fruit Bread was released in 2001. Bass player Alan Browne from Irish band Dirt Blue Gene...
, while Shields collaborated with Yo La Tengo
Yo La Tengo
Yo La Tengo, sometimes abbreviated as YLT, is an American alternative rock band formed in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1984. Since 1992, the lineup has consisted of Ira Kaplan , Georgia Hubley , and James McNew .Despite achieving limited mainstream success, Yo La Tengo has been called "the quintessential...
, Primal Scream
Primal Scream
Primal Scream are a Scottish alternative rock band originally formed in 1982 in Glasgow by Bobby Gillespie and Jim Beattie and now based in London. The current lineup consists of Gillespie, Andrew Innes , Martin Duffy , and Darrin Mooney...
, and Dinosaur Jr
Dinosaur Jr
Dinosaur Jr. is an American alternative rock band formed in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1984. Originally called Dinosaur, prior to legal issues that forced the group to change their name, the band disbanded in 1997 until reuniting in 2005...
.
Reportedly, two separate albums of new music were recorded by Shields in his home studio, but were abandoned. According to sources, one was possibly influenced by jungle music
Drum and bass
Drum and bass is a type of electronic music which emerged in the late 1980s. The genre is characterized by fast breakbeats , with heavy bass and sub-bass lines...
. Shields later confirmed that at least one full album of new material was abandoned. He said, "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." He later explained, "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." However, Shields later said to Magnet
Magnet (magazine)
Magnet is a music magazine which generally focuses on alternative, independent, or out-of-the-mainstream bands.-History:The magazine is published four times a year, and is independently owned and edited by Eric T. Miller. Music magazines with a similar focus in the 1990s era included Option,...
magazine, "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. In 2007 Shields announced that the band had reunited and that a new album they had started recording in 1996 was "3/4th finished."
Loveless
Jim DeRogatis
James "Jim" DeRogatis is an American music critic and co-host of Sound Opinions. DeRogatis has written articles for magazines such as Spin, Guitar World and Modern Drummer, and for fifteen years was the pop music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times.He joined Columbia College Chicago as a full-time...
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
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground was an American rock band formed in New York City. First active from 1964 to 1973, their best-known members were Lou Reed and John Cale, who both went on to find success as solo artists. Although experiencing little commercial success while together, the band is often cited...
." Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
has praised the album and said, regarding the song "Soon", that "[i]t set a new standard for pop
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
. It's the vaguest music ever to have been a hit." Robert Smith
Robert Smith (musician)
Robert James Smith is an English musician. He is the lead singer, guitar player and principal songwriter of the rock band The Cure, and its only constant member since its founding in 1976...
of The Cure
The Cure
The Cure are an English rock band formed in Crawley, West Sussex in 1976. The band has experienced several line-up changes, with frontman, vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter Robert Smith being the only constant member...
discovered Loveless after a period of almost exclusively listening to "disco
Disco
Disco is a genre of dance music. Disco acts charted high during the mid-1970s, and the genre's popularity peaked during the late 1970s. It had its roots in clubs that catered to African American, gay, psychedelic, and other communities in New York City and Philadelphia during the late 1960s and...
, or Irish bands like the Dubliners
The Dubliners
The Dubliners are an Irish folk band founded in 1962.-Formation and history:The Dubliners, initially known as "The Ronnie Drew Ballad Group", formed in 1962 and made a name for themselves playing regularly in O'Donoghue's Pub in Dublin...
" as a means of avoiding his contemporaries, and said, "[My Bloody Valentine] was the first band I heard who quite clearly pissed all over us, and their album Loveless is certainly one of my all-time three favourite records. It's the sound of someone [Shields] who is so driven that they're demented. And the fact that they spent so much time and money on it is so excellent." Billy Corgan
Billy Corgan
William Patrick "Billy" Corgan, Jr. is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and occasional poet best known as the frontman and sole permanent member of The Smashing Pumpkins. Formed by Corgan and guitarist James Iha in Chicago, Illinois in 1987, the band quickly gained steam with the...
of The Smashing Pumpkins
The Smashing Pumpkins
The Smashing Pumpkins are an American alternative rock band that formed in Chicago, Illinois in 1988. Formed by Billy Corgan frontman and James Iha , the band has included Jimmy Chamberlin , D'arcy Wretzky , and currently includes Jeff Schroeder Mike Byrne , and Nicole Fiorentino The Smashing...
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." Corgan later recruited Alan Moulder to co-produce the Pumpkins' album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is the third album by American alternative rock band The Smashing Pumpkins, released October 24, 1995 on Virgin Records. Produced by frontman Billy Corgan with Flood and Alan Moulder, the twenty-eight-track album was released as a two-disc CD and triple LP...
(1995). Trent Reznor
Trent Reznor
Michael Trent Reznor is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, record producer, and leader of industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. Reznor is also a member of How to Destroy Angels alongside his wife, Mariqueen Maandig, and Atticus Ross. He was previously associated with bands Option 30,...
of Nine Inch Nails
Nine Inch Nails
Nine Inch Nails is an American industrial rock project, founded in 1988 by Trent Reznor in Cleveland, Ohio. As its main producer, singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist, Reznor is the only official member of Nine Inch Nails and remains solely responsible for its direction...
, who praised the album's musical diversity and production, also worked with Moulder on the third Nine Inch Nails studio album, The Fragile
The Fragile
In terms of narrative, virtually no references are made to the aspects depicted in The Downward Spiral. Like The Downward Spiral, The Fragile is a concept album, but, as a double album, is nearly twice the length of its predecessor. Reznor's vocals, for the most part, are much more melodic and...
. Trey Anastasio
Trey Anastasio
Trey Anastasio is an American guitarist, composer, and vocalist most noted for his work with the rock band Phish...
of jam band
Jam band
-Ambiguity:By the late 1990s use of the term jam band also became ambiguous. An editorial at jamband.com suggested that any band of which a primary band such as Phish has done a cover of be included as jam band. The example was including New York post-punk band Talking Heads after Phish performed...
Phish
Phish
Phish is an American rock band noted for its musical improvisation, extended jams, and exploration of music across genres. Formed at the University of Vermont in 1983 , the band's four members – Trey Anastasio , Mike Gordon , Jon Fishman , and Page McConnell Phish is an American rock band...
believed that "Loveless [was] the best album recorded in the '90s", and wanted his band to cover the album in its entirety for a Halloween
Halloween
Hallowe'en , also known as Halloween or All Hallows' Eve, is a yearly holiday observed around the world on October 31, the night before All Saints' Day...
show. Robert Pollard
Robert Pollard
Robert Pollard is an American rock musician and singer-songwriter who is the leader and creative force behind indie rock group Guided by Voices, who disbanded in 2004, only to reform in 2010...
of indie rock
Indie rock
Indie rock is a genre of alternative rock that originated in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1980s. Indie rock is extremely diverse, with sub-genres that include lo-fi, post-rock, math rock, indie pop, dream pop, noise rock, space rock, sadcore, riot grrrl and emo, among others...
band Guided by Voices
Guided by Voices
Guided by Voices is an American indie rock band originating from Dayton, Ohio. Beginning with the band's formation in 1983, it made frequent personnel changes but always maintained the presence of principal songwriter Robert Pollard...
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." Loveless has also been said to have made a considerable influence on the career of British band Radiohead
Radiohead
Radiohead are an English rock band from Abingdon, Oxfordshire, formed in 1985. The band consists of Thom Yorke , Jonny Greenwood , Ed O'Brien , Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway .Radiohead released their debut single "Creep" in 1992...
, particularly influencing the band's textured guitar sound. Instrumental band Japancakes
Japancakes
-History:Rhythm guitarist Eric Berg formed the band with the idea of putting ten musicians in a band without any rehearsal, and performing a D chord for 45 minutes . He continued performances with numerous instrumentalists before releasing their first recording If I Could See Dallas on Kindercore...
covered the album in its entirety on Loveless (2007), replacing vocals with steel guitar
Steel guitar
Steel guitar is a type of guitar or the method of playing the instrument. Developed in Hawaii in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a steel guitar is usually positioned horizontally; strings are plucked with one hand, while the other hand changes the pitch of one or more strings with the use...
and distortion with a clean sound.
Track listing
All songs written by Kevin ShieldsKevin Shields
Kevin Patrick Shields is an American-born, Irish vocalist, guitarist, and producer of alternative rock band My Bloody Valentine....
unless otherwise noted.
- "Only Shallow" (Bilinda ButcherBilinda ButcherBilinda Jayne Butcher is a vocalist/guitarist for the rock band My Bloody Valentine.-Biography:Butcher was raised in London and then Derbyshire. She went on to study dance at Laban College in London, but she dropped out after a year due to developing a case of cystitis...
, Shields) – 4:17 - "Loomer" (Butcher, Shields) – 2:38
- "Touched" (Colm Ó Cíosóig) – 0:56
- "To Here Knows When" (Butcher, Shields) – 5:31
- "When You Sleep" – 4:11
- "I Only Said" – 5:34
- "Come in Alone" – 3:58
- "Sometimes" – 5:19
- "Blown a Wish" (Butcher, Shields) – 3:36
- "What You Want" – 5:33
- "Soon" – 6:58
Sources
- Cavanagh, David (2000). The Creation Records Story: 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.