My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is the rare album that made its way into my collection without me hearing any of it until minutes after laying the cash down on the counter. I had heard plenty about the album, just not the music itself, but when it came right down to it, something about that hazy, red, distorted guitar photograph on the cover seduced me into buying it. And then came the first listen, with leadoff track “Only Shallow” surging through me, my ears left defenseless but ecstatic. The experience was akin to the infamous montage scenes in Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream—I soaked in the rush of sound, blood vessels expanding, pupils dilating—without the prostitution or severed limbs of course.
Millions of words and inches have already been committed to describing and discussing Loveless, and to try and add something new could either be seen as superfluous or arrogant, but everything that’s been said about this album bears repeating. It’s as stunning a rock album as one will likely ever hear, dense and noisy, chaotic but calming. Loveless is driven by guitars—big guitars, loud guitars, hazy and oblique sheets of guitar, cascading waterfalls of guitar, strings, distortion and tremolo. To hear Loveless, one would think that there were about 100 guitar tracks in every song, but Kevin Shields once debunked this myth, claiming that there are, in fact, fewer guitars on this album than on most bands’ demos. Furthermore, there are no chorus or flanger pedals on Loveless, unlike the work of many of their shoegazing contemporaries.
How, exactly, My Bloody Valentine came to create the sounds on Loveless seems almost an act of divine inspiration. The band’s approach was deceptively simple, with minimal effects pedals used, though it was most certainly a studio creation, with various producers being hired and fired over the two years during which it was recorded, and countless takes, often recorded with no communication, or even access to hearing the recording, between musicians and engineers. Still, the deft use of the equipment and the reliance upon a relatively bare-bones guitar setup led to the creation of an album that sounds enormous, surreal, even magical, but familiar and seductive. From: https://www.treblezine.com/my-bloody-valentine-loveless-review/
