Tiptoe down to the holy places

My Bloody Valentine: Loveless

Lost in the fog. Becalmed. Angelic voices, the song of the sirens. Echoes and massive sonic reverberation.

I used to listen to Ride and wonder why it was that they got such a bad rap as second-tier shoegazers. That is, until the moment I put Loveless in my player and listened, awestruck. The melodies formed out of discordant pieces, so many overlapping, multi-tracked parts that they blur out the edges of each other, just layer upon layer of beautiful noise. Everything bleeds. “To Here Knows When”, with its oscillating waves of feedback, delirious sexuality, and drugged, smeared final guitar part, still retains clarity in its melodic synthesizer parts. The melodic, sunny rock of “When You Sleep” is thunderous in its layering, every piece fractionally extended. “Sometimes” is an endless torrent of guitar, like one impossibly sustained final note. By the time you reach “Soon” at the end, its buzzsaw guitars, manic violin piece, pounding beat, and stretched-out gasping vocals almost sound conventional.

I’ve spent entire nights listening to this on repeat. Sometimes I listen to it on headphones in the dark in the wee small hours and lose track of the passage of time until sunrise. It is order from chaos and the one album that no matter how bad things are going will obliterate anything bothering me while it plays. Everything bleeds.

Greatest album ever created, approximately.

~ by jshopa on June 25, 2008.