My Bloody Valentine: Loveless

Roses are red, Kevin is blue

My Bloody Valentine's (MBV) Loveless represents all that is well and good in music, but things haven't been well and good for the band in 1999. MBV, otherwise known as Kevin Shields, has not released an album since Loveless in 1999, and rumors about him have reached a mythic grandeur only surpassed by the death of Paul and the rebirth of Tupac. Shields has allegedly made complete albums since Loveless that he's subsequently destroyed. In the process, his exorbitant studio expenses have almost bankrupted Sire, Creation, and Island Records. More hearsay swirls by the day.

SHAWN CHENG/YH

Yet all the intrigue surrounding Shields cannot make Loveless any more mythical than it already is. When it was released, it was the newest sound in a year loaded with them. It arrived the same year—one of the best in rock history—as Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted, the Wedding Present's Seamonsters, Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet, and most famously, Nirvana's Nevermind.

Unlike most of those releases, Loveless is a completely coherent album; each song forms from the one preceding and evolves into the one following. It's an album that resists the now-inescapable single—each individual song is enhanced by its position among the others. In fact, if it weren't for the CD player's track ticker, it would be impossible to tell where each track ended and began.

Each song is constructed to disorient. Many patterns of sound are layered and blurred together, making it difficult to tell one from another. Although MBV does not stray far from the traditional rock music instruments—guitar, bass, drums, and sometimes sampler—the meticulous layering of sound gives the music a dreamy and cyclical feel. Even with headphones tightly clasped around ears, it is almost impossible to separate each detail from the thickness of the mix.

This almost-orchestral approach is reminiscent of Brian Wilson on Pet Sounds. Shields rejects the strictures of the linear pop song, and replaces them with a kind of noisy ambiance that reads in an infinity of ways. There are prehistoric grumblings ("Touched"), primordial bliss-outs ("To Here Knows When"), regrets paired with ecstatic epiphanies ("When You Sleep").

What makes music great is that moment of transcendence when sound becomes emotion, or expresses thought that eludes words. Loveless is such a moment. And hopefully, like Tupac, Kevin Shields will rise again. (Sire)

—Nathaniel Rich

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