Loveless by My Bloody Valentine
Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, originally released in 1991, was once just another album I was very much looking forward to checking out, but has - over the decades - assumed greater personal emotional significance, to the point where it feels like part of my DNA.
Vinyl copy of Loveless - on my mantlepiece
Yet, until April 2021, when I finally received the new Domino reissue from “fear an phoist,” I never possessed a copy of the record on vinyl.
Released betwixt the post-punk and post-rock eras, this visionary LP from creators Kevin Shields, Bilinda Butcher, Debbie Googe and Colm Ó Ciosóig is my favourite album of all time, just edging my vote ahead of both Joy Division albums.
When did I first hear the LP? If I were relying on my memory, I would guess that it was a fine evening in September 1991. My recollection is that the first copy in West Kerry was purchased - on cassette - by a guy in my circle of friends, Seán Ó Sé, and eventually that the album was passed around to every music-lover in the school over the course of the following weeks, as we all took turns to make copies for our Walkmans.
But memory is notoriously unreliable and as I glance at the LP’s Wikipedia entry, I learn that it wasn’t released until early November of that same year. By then the evenings had gotten shorter and there was a nip in the air. So, by the time I must have actually finally got around to hearing it, it was at a much later stage of the year, which is totally out of kilter with my own experience of this record: a record that I’ve long associated with summer’s slow, languorous cross-fade into early autumn.
It’s perhaps no surprise that my memory of hearing the record for the first time is so much at odds with how I probably did experience it, for Loveless really is a record like no other. It has forged its own unique corner in the music canon, sounding like no other record before it or since (though so many have tried to imitate it). It is a record that constantly bewilders and beguiles. It is also admittedly an album that also frustrates some new listeners whose expectations have been raised too much by devoted disciples such as I.
Like all the great musical oeuvres, the record sounds gloriously out of time. One might be forgiving for believing that it was cooked up by a commune of acid-glazed freaks in some alternate Laurel Canyon of the late sixties. Or a diehard admirer might state the case that its sounds were forged in some distant stellar nursery, detonating into existence through a mega-burst of frenetic star-formation (rather than how it actually came into being, with sonic uber-perfectionist Kevin Shields almost bankrupting Creation Records by using at least nineteen different studios and allegedly running up a bill of £250,000 to try and record the strange sounds he was hearing in his head).
There are plenty of accounts of how the record came into being and scribes more eloquent than I, have almost managed to describe its unique, almost synesthetic sound (the colours on the albums sleeve seem to ‘look’ like how it ‘sounds’ and vice-versa). Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher’s vocals are deliberately obscure, and the record was conceived of unusual production techniques and unorthodox tuning systems, all of which lends the album its dreamy, ethereal, otherworldly glow.
Strangely, for a record I know so intimately, I often get the song-titles confused. Play any track for me in isolation and chances are I might give you the wrong song title. Like all the great albums, the sum is more than its parts and is best experienced in the sequence it was programmed it, from Only Shallow through to Soon. Usually when I hear the record, especially after a period of abstinence, I immediately want to re-immerse myself in the listening experience.
Loveless is an experience unto itself and it somehow creates this unique warm, fuzzy feeling in my belly in a way that no other album, book, film or work of art - before or since - can ever quite replicate.
