My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless (2006)

In many ways Mike McGonigal’s entry in the 33-1/3 series feels like a template for how to do it, but I’m not sure I can put my finger on why exactly. For one thing Loveless is not so obviously a classic album, at least within the boomer frame that is inevitably a big part of this series and my own perceptions (by default if nothing else—boomer albums have just had more time to grow classic). McGonigal mixes up the structure so many of these authors take: 1) a history of the artist, and 2) the album track by track. His rundown of the songs is fast and high-level, for example, showing up in the second chapter of 17. The rest of the book does involve a history, specifically of how the album was recorded, why it took so long, and why nothing else (at the time the book was published in 2006), or very little, had been recorded and released by My Bloody Valentine since. I never saw MBV but I owned Loveless in the early ‘90s, which struck me itself as a certain template for shoegaze and maybe some aspects of grunge: a thundering bottom, on top of which floated lovely melody in the high register, ghostly, ethereal, and often quite striking, heard through cacophonies of distortion. I played it a lot. Listening again with more perspective, it’s apparent MBV was something unusual and special. It was as if they took the dynamics formulas and smeared them sideways slightly, like fingerpainting. McGonigal gets into MBV principal Kevin Shields’s use of the guitar tremolo bar, an auditory concept Shields applied to every part of the project. The lyrics are swallowed up and work more like rorschach if you’re inclined to pay attention to lyrics. The band was legendary for deafeningly loud concerts. Some of the effects McGonigal and others have described veer alarmingly close to physical damage. It often sounds like evidence of tinnitus but at the same time with spiritual overtones. I especially like the way McGonigal deals with this aspect of the album and band. He’s not overtly claiming spiritual experiences but read between the lines. He circles the album and its impact, somehow managing to keep it all straightforward, lucid, and compelling. I didn’t necessarily recognize it at the time, but there’s little question now of the status of Loveless as classic. McGonigal was among the many faithful. He almost casually, deceptively makes the case for how the album works, which is remarkable given that most words simply fall short in this kind of heady realm. This book is not necessarily as classic as the album, but it comes closer than you might think it could.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.