Loveless cost a quarter of a million pounds and nearly destroyed Creation Records. Kevin Shields spent two years and used nineteen different recording studios to create an album that sounds like nothing that came before it and nothing that has come since. Every attempt to replicate its sound — and there have been thousands — has failed, because Loveless is not really a collection of techniques. It is the product of a singular obsessive vision pushed to its absolute limit.
The guitar sound is the thing, of course. Shields achieved his signature tone by manipulating his Fender Jazzmaster's tremolo arm while strumming, creating a pitch-bent, seasick wavering that makes the guitars sound simultaneously solid and liquid. Layer upon layer of these treated guitars are stacked on top of each other until they form a wall of sound so dense it becomes almost tactile. On "Only Shallow," the opening blast of distortion is so physically overwhelming that it redefines your relationship with volume — it is not loud in the conventional sense; it is enveloping, immersive, like being submerged in warm water.
But Loveless is not merely an exercise in texture. Beneath the noise, the songs are gorgeous. "Sometimes" is built on a chord progression of disarming simplicity, its melody carried by Bilinda Butcher's vocals, which are mixed so deep into the guitar layers that they become another instrumental texture rather than a conventional lead. "When You Sleep" buries a perfect pop song beneath layers of distortion and feedback, the melody fighting to be heard through the noise like sunlight through storm clouds.
The rhythm section is criminally underappreciated. Colm O'Ciosóig's drumming is fluid and inventive, using fills and rolls that create a sense of constant forward motion even when the guitars are hovering in a state of suspended animation. Debbie Googe's bass provides the low-end foundation that prevents the whole edifice from floating away into the stratosphere.
"To Here Knows When" remains the album's most radical moment — a track where the guitars have been processed so heavily that they no longer sound like guitars at all, but like some new instrument that exists only in the space between sleep and waking. It is terrifying and beautiful in equal measure. Loveless is the sound of someone pushing rock music so far that it stops being rock music and becomes something entirely new.
