My Bloody Valentine- Loveless

One of the goals of this project is to not only to discover new music, but to revisit old albums I sort of remember liking and seeing if they hold up. I haven’t done the latter as much since the former is more interesting to me. However, with my interest being piqued by ambient music I thought I’d revisit an album I vaguely remember being ambient like, and also enjoying: My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. And boy, was I wrong.

There is a genre of music called “drone” that is similar to ambient, yet different. Ambient is music that functions as foreground and background, and that’s achieved through various looping tracks. Drone is music that repeats the same notes or group of notes over and over again on a loop. Both can have a hypnotic, subconscious effect, but they are distinct. Anyways, I went into this album expecting ambient and got drone. And I was not pleasantly surprised.

Loveless is considered one of the greatest albums in the “shoegaze” genre. “Shoegaze” is a term coined by music critics to describe a sound that was coming out of England and Ireland in the late eighties. It comes from the fact that during live performances, the musicians would be too focused on their distortion pedals to look at the audience, and that should give you some idea as to how this sounds. Distortion and effects layered on top of each other until you can’t recognize the original.

The fact that there is an original might be the most disconcerting aspect of the songs on this album. Each song has a definite sound, like it was an acoustic number or a up tempo rock song at first, then it went through some kind of change, took some kind of drug and got twisted and changed into something new. As such I found myself always on my back foot with this album, waiting for a haymaker of weirdness to come crashing down on my head. It never did.

3/5 This is a really good album, make no mistake, but I’m not sure you need to check it out unless you’re looking to expand your tastes. Do not make the mistake of listening to this when you’re not in the right mood, otherwise you’ll come out hating it. I’m not sure what the right mood is, maybe alone with headphones, somewhere you can appreciate the weirdness, but do not force it. That’s just asking for a bad experience.