Loveless.
| My Bloody Valentine
Loveless.
Loveless is the second studio album by English-Irish rock band My Bloody Valentine. It was released on 4 November 1991 in the United Kingdom by Creation Records and in the United States by Sire Records. The album was recorded over a two-year period between 1989 and 1991, with vocalist and guitarist Kevin Shields leading the recording sessions and experimenting with guitar tremolo techniques and tuning systems, samplers, and meticulous production methods. The band cycled through nineteen different studios and many engineers during the album's prolonged recording, with its production cost rumoured to have reached 250,000. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
Loveless oozes a sonic balm that first embraces and then softly pulverizes the frantic stress of life.
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Soundblab
Every aspect here is beautiful and full of intricacy that requires multiple listens. I would say it requires over 20 listens if you want to recognize the sheer genius behind this masterpiece and a timeless classic.
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NME
Despite all the grief, and against all the odds, MBV had pulled off something truly remarkable.
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Pitchfork
My Bloody Valentine's output during the band's miracle years between 1988 and 1991 still feels like a gift.
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BBC Music
Get this magnificent masterpiece and play very, very loud indeed.
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All Music
The album's perfection sounded shoegazing's death-knell and raised expectations for the next My Bloody Valentine album to unreasonably high levels.
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Drowned in Sound
For a record where so much toil was exacted on smoothing over its bruises, it’s these disfigurements that make Loveless so endearing.
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Sputnik Music
Loveless, and My Bloody Valentine themselves, thrive in so many different ways that it's actually rather hard to believe. This album brims with experimentation, but also the realization that to achieve greater heights, one needs to becomes fully acquainted with every aspect of music.
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Pop Matters
Loveless, unlike an aged canvas whose texture or tint may have faded with time, remains a pulsing spectrum of infallible splendor, a standard to be met. It still sounds like the future, for now and ever.
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Slant Magazine
Indeed, its legacy will and should always be defined primarily by Shields’s enormously innovative accomplishments in capturing and manipulating his electric guitar performances in the studio. But those accomplishments would have little practical value if the songs themselves didn’t make the album so inescapably listenable.
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Wired
Even if My Bloody Valentine never makes another full-length, the band's hallowed seat in the sonic pantheon is secure.
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Overblown
Loveless itself sounds like nothing else ever written.
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The Quietus
My Bloody Valentine sound wide open to the universe, the opposite of blank, the opposite of bland, and their historical significance can go hang, because everything that's ever happened, or ever will, is happening right here and right now in the best of this extraordinary music.
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Clash Music
Magnum opus of the shoegazing genre.
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Anhedonic Headphones
There are moments of great abrasion, moments that swoon, moments of slow motion majesty, moments that despite the muddled and mysterious lyrics, can evoke great emotion, and the biggest surprise of all, there are moments that fall into a traditional pop song—verse, chorus, verse—structure.
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Seattle Pi
It's an entirely timeless album - even today, it remains one of the most strange and beautiful records ever recorded.
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Scott's Spectacular Song Selections
Loveless is easily the best album of 1991, one of the best albums of the 1990s, and one of the greatest of all time, in my opinion. This masterpiece deserves repeated listens and will be enjoyed for years to come.
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Peek-A-Boo Magazine
The legendary bill of £250,000 soon becomes increasingly real when you dig into the perfectionism at the source of 'Loveless'.
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Only Solitaire
Critics and musicians will always find more to cherish here than the average music lover, too lazy to scoop the sunny beauty of the songs out of the wobbly, disconcerting production - and, honestly, once you've scooped that out, you'll probably want to put it immediately back in.
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Treble Zine
To call Loveless the best shoegazer album of all time would be true, but doesn’t scratch the surface of just how mesmerizing it is.
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What Culture
Loveless was the best album of all time BEFORE it was remastered, and it’s the best album of all time after.
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Beat Magazine
Loveless is definitely an acquired taste, but if given the chance, you may find yourself listening along as well.
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City Pages
I’m probably more emotionally attached to several other albums, but no other album makes me feel even vaguely like Loveless does even though I can’t -- even 25 years later -- accurately describe what those feelings are.
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The National Student
Whereas adjectives such as perfectionism and fluidity arrive instantaneously, their greatest achievement is a pristine and unparalleled balance of beauty and delicacy in a world synonymous with ferality.
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Tiny Mix Tapes
With Isn’t Anything, MBV gave birth to a whole load of imitators; with Loveless, they upped the ante so high that no one before or since sounds anything like it.
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Radio UTD
In the end there is hardly a superlative I could place upon this album that hasn't in some way found its way there countless times prior.
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Hotpress
Whatever they were playing at in the studio, they did some amazing things to the sound.
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The Student Playlist
As the listener, you must bring something to the table in order to gain maximum enjoyment, suspending your preconceptions about what guitar music can or should do and immersing yourself in its ghostly, formless structures.
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Willamette Week
Loveless is a stirring success, in that it reasserts both My Bloody Valentine's importance and Feinstein's creativity.
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River Front Times
It’s perfect from beginning to end.
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Prefix Mag
Loveless is unequivocally the definitive shoegaze album, as Nevermind is the definitive grunge album.
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The Needle Drop
Even 20 years after its initial release, this album still thrives as one of the strangest auditory experiences in rock and pop. Kevin Shields and company truly came together with a sonically surreal album here that still has modern experimentalists intrigued.
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All Groovy Music
The whole album can be described as an original work of art with its creative and innovative sound, making My Bloody Valentine the kings of Shoegaze.
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The AU Review
Loveless by My Bloody Valentine . . . changed the face of music as we know it.
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Luddite Stereo
It’s a touchstone for so many musicians, not just in terms of remarkable technique and instrumentation but the way the guitars, vocals, and feedback all blend together to create an overall mood.
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Mark Prindle
One of the most romantic guitar-heavy records I've ever heard.
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Westword
Loveless is a reflection and evolution of underground American rock of the '80s, and that sets it apart from the work of most its peers in the UK, and accounts for the reason it has resonated with musicians so strongly and exerted such an influence on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond since.
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Something Awful
Well, the original album consisted of some murmuring, plus lots of guitars and some more guitars. Now, thanks to miraculous new mastering technology, it's louder.
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Stray Observations
If I missed the revolution Loveless caused, that shouldn’t make this album worse to me to than anyone else. A classic holds up to time. A “classic” does not.
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The Great Albums
Technically incorrect . . . still sound[s] wonderful.
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Rocksucker
Loveless… It most certainly isn’t.
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