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.