Along with the hard hitting desert riffs that will be melting your brain tonight, we will be dedicating the 2nd hour to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless which turned 20 this weekend. Loveless has been heralded as "The best album of the 90's" and on of the
"most pivotal albums in modern rock history" and while it doesn't fit
the format of the show, it has influenced artists of all genres and
myself, personally.
The story behind
Loveless is as engaging as the album itself. It was recorded in 19 different studios over the course of two years, and it cost
Creation Records an estimated
£250,000,
nearly bankrupting the label. The recording process was plagued with
health issues (most of the drums had to be sampled due to drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig's health and personal problems, the only live drum tracks are on
Only Shallow and
Touched),
fighting between the band and label, legal trouble and equipment
issues. At one point during the mastering process, the entire album went
out of phase and had to be re-set from the memory of guitarist/singer
Kevin Shields' memory. An album mastering generally takes a day,
Loveless took 13.
Though a hit among critics, Loveless
only sold a mere 250,000 copies due to the fact that the band only did a
small tour in support of the album, the band's name was forbidden to be
on the sleeve, and there were no singles, despite music videos being
made for 3 songs.
So what makes Loveless so damn special? The vocal are buried and the song structure for most of the tracks are the same. Well, Loveless
is a triumph is guitar based rock. On most songs there are one or two
guitar tracks with minimal effects. While most shoegaze artists relied
on a chorus and flange pedal, Kevin Shields did most of his handy
work by using the tremolo bar, and that's it. Instead of using a
wah-wah pedal, he recorded the guitar track, replayed it through an
equalizer and manually adjusted knobs. When asked if using a wah-wah
would acheive the same effect, he replied, "In attitude toward sound,
yes. But not in approach."
I could go on and on about all the little quirks about this album, like how
Bilinda Butcher's
voice is used as an instrument and how many vocal bits are sampled and
used as such throughout the album or how most of the instrumentation is
done by
Shields himself or how when the vocals were being recorded,
Butcher and
Shields
were cloaked behind a screen and the only was the engineers knew that
something was being recorded were the VU meters moving or how there are
12 vocal tracks on
When You Sleep because they couldn't nail down
the perfect track, so they just mixed them all down, but I'm going to
let the music speak for itself. Want to learn more? Check out the
Loveless wiki!
Never heard Loveless
before? Well, you're in luck! I will be spinning the album in its
entirety during the 2nd hour of the show tonight. I hope you all enjoy
the departure from the norm tonight. So remember to tune in tonight at 10PM EST on VMFM 91.7 by clicking the link on the right. See you tonight!
