I don't write as much about music as I'd like, but there was a period in my life when it meant almost everything to me. (Sadly, internet culture may have changed this by turning music into a highly accessible commodity.) Before I began on my adult spiritual/metaphysical quest, music was my scared experience. Sure, there was the adolescent awakening to sex, drugs (not so much), and rock n' roll, but I was also drawn to music than transcended my shallow states to bring me somewhere higher (even if it just touched some Romantic notions I had around life).
Being a product of early-1980's music, I got interested in the post-punk and new wave movements that started to permeate mainstream radio during that time. There weren't any interesting college radio stations in southern Maine back then, but every so often something cool would emerge on the airwaves. For instance, take the minor hit of the Flock of Seagulls' Space Age Love Song...
I remember being swept up by the ethereal chords and melody that revolved around the song. The lyrics were stark, but this allowed plenty of room for interpretation. Sometimes less is more, and the music itself dominated the experience allowing me to be taken away in reverie to something that felt beautiful and real.
I began to write this post because I ran across Pitchfork's 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of all Time. Shoegaze is a form of music that captured me in the 1990's, as it further elaborated the ethereal sounds that I fell in love with through a song like Space Age Love Song. As wikipedia states, shoegaze “is a subgenre of indie rock, alternative rock, or neo-psychedelia that emerged in the United Kingdom in the late 1980s and reached peak popularity in the early 1990s. The style is typified by the blurring of component musical parts—typically significant guitar distortion, feedback, and obscured vocals—into indistinguishable mixture of sound.” But what that definition doesn't get at is all that distortion, feedback, and obscurity often created something angelic. It was like a new form of Church music landing in secular, indie world.
The album that came in Pitchfork's #1 position is no surprise to anyone. My Bloody Valentine's Loveless still stands as one of my favorite albums of all time. When I first heard it, it was literally a spiritual experience for me. Let's see what Pitchfork has to say...
Loveless is a guided meditation on love and its absence that conjures an emotional reality instead of merely depicting one. At the album’s core is a succession of super-sweet melodies filtered through the softly psychedelic subjectivity of a mind engulfed by thirst. Shields’ bent notes are that introspection made sonic, their familiar guitar sounds so dramatically distorted, you might start to suspect that it’s your ears twisting them. The glide guitar on opening track “Only Shallow” contains the same creeping violence as the onset of passion; “Loomer,” which comes next, speeds into the childhood origins of longing.
The album isn’t just romantic, though. It’s also Romantic in the 19th century sense, a work so grand that it connects us to the limitless universe and reminds us how small we are as individuals within it. Coleridge and Turner used nature to access the infinite, but the internal landscape Shields locates is just as expansive. The radical inclusiveness of these songs even evades the specificity of gender by mixing Shields’ and Belinda Butcher’s vocals into androgynous foam on soaring monuments to the lover's gaze like “When You Sleep.” Just audible beneath the halo of fuzz that surrounds “Sometimes” are lyrics that express a frustration we’ve all felt: “I don’t know how you could not love me now.” Loveless is the defining statement of shoegaze because it discovered, in layered guitar sounds and submerged singing, a language that serenely overwhelms as it distills the universal human experience.Yup. What more can I say, except post a couple songs that delight me...
Well, actually I did have something to say. Back in 2007, I read the 33 1/3 book about making the Loveless record and left a review on Amazon. Here's what bombastic Ted had to say back then...
Brilliant overview of my favorite album of all time. So despite my bias toward MBV's effort, my intent was to read this book with an eye toward disinterested formalism. And the result for me was quite pleasing. McGonigal gave several perspectives that overrided some long standing myths, and maybe gave us a couple new ones to ponder. Bottom line, he gets it. He gets the fact that this CD goes beyond the overused ethereal descriptors, and touches the listener in a deep spiritual way. It's not about lyrics, melody, production, sounds...it's about the whole. The poignant philosopher Schopenhauer stated that great art will always dissolve the subject from the object, and he always placed music on top of the hierarchy of art forms. Loveless always had that experience for me, so when I read McGonigal's book I was happy to see that he never swayed from his lofty view, yet remained grounded as well. After all, the process of making great art is never quite as lofty as the outcome. We learn of the painstaking process Shields and others went through to make something that always seemed to be on the brink of demise. McGonigal made this struggle an enjoyable read, and he has given us a perfect literary companion to one of the most perfect musical experiences.Okay, not my best review and the book was probably more mediocre than I led on back then. Another mediocre thing was seeing My Bloody Valentine live in 2013. I left halfway during the show. It was too loud and musically a let down. Sometimes the mystique should remain a mystery.