Tag Archives: loveless

#993: My Bloody Valentine – Only Shallow

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Welcoming you into the world of My Bloody Valentine’s 1991 opus Loveless are four strikes of a snare drum and an incomprehensible noise of what I could only describe as elephant/vacuum-like sounding sirens over an ascending chord progression. When I was going through what were considered to be the best albums ever, according to besteveralbums.com, around 2012/13, I came across this album. This track, ‘Only Shallow’, starts it off. By the end of the LP, I still hadn’t really understood what I had just heard. It was certainly different then. It’s still in a league of its own more than 30 years later.

10 years on from that first listen, I’ve come to understand it a lot more. Particularly this track. It eventually occurred to me that paying close attention to the track’s bassline was the key to realising what was going on, ’cause amidst those guitar strings are continuously warping and bending due to Kevin Shields’ signature use of the whammy bar, the aforementioned elephant noises and Bilinda Butcher’s dreamy but hushed vocals, it can be difficult to find that element that makes sense through all the commotion. That’s just my personal experience though. And I’m not saying that the bassline is the best part of the whole track, I just find it to be the melodic centre that anchors everything together. It plays these higher notes during the dreamy verses, sort of following the same progression as Butcher’s vocal, so when it reverts to the track’s main riff where all the noises come into the mix again, the whole track regains such a heavy momentum.

There are lyrics within this song. No one really knows what they are. Any lyrics site that has them up there probably have words that sound close to what’s being said. Looking through each album track on those places, you can kind of gauge that the lyrics are going more for a approach of sound more than sense. But officially, no one knows for sure. Just adds to the mystery of it all. This what this track is, mysterious. It’s well-documented how Kevin Shields got the sounds he required to make the entire record and how he almost bankrupted the record label in doing so. But even then you’re still left wondering how this track sounds the way it does. If I haven’t said so already, I like this track a lot. But man, is it hard to describe.

#578: My Bloody Valentine – I Only Said

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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.