Who d’ya think of when you see/hear the word ‘shoegaze’? ‘My Bloody Valentine’, right? ‘Loveless‘, eh? Yeah, I think that’s pretty much how it goes. The 1991 album by the Irish band has been universally loved by many for almost thirty years for essentially laying down the shoegaze genre foundation, influencing thousands of bands that have formed under its wake.

I didn’t listen to it until about four years ago, I guess. Clearly it didn’t leave so much of a mark on me at the time, but I kept it on my iTunes library so I must have thought something was cool about it. It was a few months back that I decided to listen to it in full again and I can confirm that it’s definitely a 10 outta 10. First time listeners will probably categorise it as a bunch of noise. And it is. That’s very much true. But there are some brilliant melodies under that noise. Melodies that repeat and repeat endlessly until they remain in the subconscious and you start humming them in the shower unexpectedly on some days. This applies to today’s song, ‘I Only Said’, the sixth track on Loveless.

Now another thing about the tracks on the album is that a lot of the lyrics are indecipherable. There are a lot of lyrics site which provide an approximate estimation of what might be said in the music, though the band have never confirmed anything. I don’t know what’s being sung in this track; I normally just make sounds that are in tune with the vocals. To me, it’s all about the instrumentation. The wailing stream-train whistle like guitars are at the forefront of the mix, relentlessly blaring throughout the track and covering the vocals before that zippy (guitar/keyboard/wtf?) riff comes in. There are probably about three verses in this whole thing, and then the track just goes on and on and on and on….. I’ve been in a shower with this song on and wondered just how long the outro goes on for. It goes on for a long time. You just get lost in it. It’s glorious stuff.