Loveless
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Current revision
- For the manga and anime series, see Loveless (manga).
{{Album infobox
| Name = Loveless
| Type = Album
| Artist = My Bloody Valentine
| Cover = MyBloodyValentineLoveless.jpg
| Background = Orange
| Released = 4 November 1991
| Recorded = 1989–1991
| Genre = Shoegazing
| Length = 48:36
| Label = Creation Records (UK)
Sire Records (US)
| Producer = Kevin Shields
| Last album = Isn't Anything
(1988)
| This album = Loveless
(1991)
| Next album =
}}
Loveless is an album by the Irish-British band My Bloody Valentine, released on November 4, 1991 (see 1991 in music) on Creation Records in the UK and on November 5 on Sire Records in the U.S. It is widely considered to be My Bloody Valentine's magnum opus, the epitome of the shoegazing genre, and one of the most influential albums of the 1990s.
The album itself cost about £100,000, but the recording process took three years and cost £250,000, resulting in two EPs (Glider and Tremolo, on which "Soon" and "To Here Knows When" made their first appearances) and four music videos, and nearly bankrupting their label.
Loveless, despite its highly enthusiastic reviews, only reached #24 on the UK Albums Chart, while never charting in the U.S.
The album cover is a movie still of a Fender Jazzmaster guitar, focused at the neck joint, from the music video for "To Here Knows When".
Brian Eno said, regarding the song "Soon", "It set a new standard for pop. It's the vaguest music ever to have been a hit."[1]
Contents |
Style
The album, for the most part composed by main guitarist and band leader Kevin Shields, is characterized by highly amplified and distorted guitars, with bass guitar and drums kept low in the mix. The vocals, which are kept relatively low in the mix as well, are consistently highly layered, breathy, and for the most part high-pitched, serving a mainly melodic function, with somewhat free-form lyrics which are often hard to make out. Themes recognizable in these are love, sleep and sex, contributing to the album's general vague, off-key ambience, more emotional than rational, and as frequently described, "dreamy". Samples, often of Bilinda Butcher's own voice, are used to establish hooks and, occasionally, melody-lines.
Melody and structure-wise, it is for the most part a pop record of sorts, filtered through almost avant-garde levels and types of distortion and noise.
Critical response
Due to its highly specific style, the record set itself apart from its sparser and often mellower peers in the shoegazing genre, therefore gathering a large amount of attention from critics. A large number of reviewers in the British music press in particular touted it as one of the best, if not the best of its genre and the album eventually became one of the most highly regarded musical references of the nineties. To this day, reviews often use it as a means of reviewing other albums by means of comparison, and it still consistently pops up on "Best Albums" lists.
Pitchfork Media named Loveless the second best album of the 90s, behind Radiohead's OK Computer. Template:RS500
Track listing
- "Only Shallow" (Bilinda Butcher, Kevin Shields) - 4:17
- "Loomer" (Butcher, Shields) - 2:38
- "Touched" (Colm O'Ciosoig) - 0:56
- "To Here Knows When" (Butcher, Shields) - 5:31
- "When You Sleep" (Shields) - 4:11
- "I Only Said" (Shields) - 5:34
- "Come in Alone" (Shields) - 3:58
- "Sometimes" (Shields) - 5:19
- "Blown a Wish" (Butcher, Shields) - 3:36
- "What You Want" (Shields) - 5:33
- "Soon" (Shields) - 6:58
Samples
Template:Multi-listen start Template:Multi-listen item Template:Multi-listen end
Personnel
Band
- Colm O'Ciosoig
- drums, sampler, mixer
- Bilinda Butcher
- vocals, guitar
- Debbie Googe
- bass
- Kevin Shields
- guitar, vocals, sampler, producer, mixer, engineer
Production
- Alan Moulder - engineer
- Dick Meaney - engineer
- Anjali Dutt - engineer
- Guy Fixsen - engineer
- Harold Burgon - engineer
- Nick Robbins - engineer
- Ingo Vauk - engineer
- Andy Wilkinson - engineer
- Darren Allison - engineer
- Nick Addison - engineer
- Charles Steel - engineer
- Tony Falter - engineer
- Hugh Price - engineer
- Adrian Bushby - engineer
- Pascale Giovetto - engineer
- Nick Savage - engineer
- My Bloody Valentine - art direction
- Angus Cameron - photography
- Ann Marie Shields - coordination
List positions
- #1 - Pitchfork Media: Top 100 Albums of the 1990s
- #2 - Pitchfork Media: Top 100 Albums of the 1990s Redux
- #219 - Rolling Stone: 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
- #22 - Spin Magazine: 100 Greatest Albums, 1985–2005
Trivia
- The Square Enix RPG game Final Fantasy VII, the seventh installment in the highly popular Final Fantasy series, features a visual reference to the album - in a full motion sequence in the beginning of the game, there is a shot of a poster which features a pale girl and the words "My Bloody Valentine" and "Loveless". It is later on explained that Loveless is the name of a popular play.