Rick Clark's Music I Love Blog - Artist: My Bloody Valentine / Album: Loveless
A friend of mine asked me if I could only listen to one thing what would it be. I said white noise. He was surprised as he was expecting me to name some piece of music. For the most part I was serious and I pretty much still feel that way.
When I began relocating to Santa Monica during the last half of 2006 I would go out driving on the LA freeways late at night, sometimes in the early morning hours. A lot was going on and I was in a kind of free fall that would last for several years. For me, LA was this strange enveloping sprawl that was exciting, exhausting and a place I learned to love in many ways and also longed to escape from, which I eventually did. Anyone who knows me knows I’m deeply rooted in the South and particularly in Memphis on a soul level. It is what it is.
Back to LA, there were several albums that got me into the zone when I was driving late at night: The Stooges’s Fun House, The Caribbean’s Populations and My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. I will get to Fun House and Populations another time, but tonight I’m in that “white noise”-meets-rock zone and My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is exactly that album.
My Bloody Valentine is comprised of Kevin Shields (vocals, guitar, sampler) and Colm O Ciosoig (drums, sampler), with Bilina Butcher (vocals, guitar) and Debbie Googe (bass). Their sound is uniquely theirs, thanks to the huge wall of layered sounds, primarily due to the otherworldly guitar playing of Kevin Shields. Some call this a Shoegaze classic. Whatever.
The band already blew me away with their debut album Say Anything, but Loveless, with its seemingly impenetrable layers of distortion and ghostly vocals ventured into totally new territory. This isn’t mainstream stuff. It really is an acquired taste for most people, if they can get into it at all. Personally, I absolutely love getting enveloped and lost in this audacious album. I don’t know what they are singing about and I don’t care, because it is all about the sound for me.
My Bloody Valentine was known for playing extraordinarily loud shows and Kevin Shields, the band’s visionary and lead guitarist, set out (as I interpret it) to capture the sound he felt inside when the band was in that supersonic loud space.
I’ve read a number of pieces on the making of this album and, by all accounts it almost financially bankrupted the record label due to the expense of making it over several years. Shields ended up playing most of the parts on Loveless. I love the tiny sounding drums and voices that are just decipherable enough to sketch out a melody and some harmonies. Some of these songs, if you let them get into you, sound beautiful. “Blown A Wish” is a good example of that. By the way, this sounds great on a good sound system and it is also a fantastic headphone experience.
So driving those miles and miles of LA freeway at night, floating over the bridges from the I-10 to the 405 going north over the Sepulveda Pass, or flying through the Foothills I-210 or the PCH 1 north of Malibu, Loveless isolated me from and also glued me to my LA experience. Amazingly, when they played in Santa Monica just down the street from where I lived, I wasn’t able to go. I would’ve loved to have seen that show.
The best way for me to listen to Loveless is top to bottom and just go with the flow, but when I just want to pick out a few tracks to get a shot of magic, I go to the tracks I’ve linked here. One link provides the entire album. There is also a fascinating video of Kevin Shields explaining how he arrived at his unique guitar sound.
Hope you enjoy. Thanks for checking out My Bloody Valentine.