7. My Bloody ValentineLoveless
It’s another obvious choice but this is a big record for me. I remember hearing the dense, droney fuzz of it and, ironically, not knowing that it took years and was recorded in some of the most expensive studios over such a long period that it almost bankrupted their record label, it made me think ‘yes, I can make otherworldly music with a guitar if my pedalboard is longer than my guitar’.
It was a really welcoming record in other ways too because it was thick and mid-range heavy so it made sense on the kind of shit home hifi that you could get at that age. There’s the loopy dance influence but also a very trippy quality to it and it felt like it kind of glued together a lot of the music that I identified with but which seemed to be positioned at odds with each other.
It’s difficult, now, to explain this gap that it helped to fill but perhaps if I just say that with a few exceptions, when I was a kid, if you walked into a record shop there were two main sections: Rock/Pop and Dance/Electronic. There was a quiet sense that you should pick a team.
Loveless refuses to pick a team, it has all the players of both teams, and both goalies, and the ref, and also only 11 players. It’s a record that greedily demands everything to be big and wide and distorted and dreamy all at the same time and it doesn’t surprise me that it took so long to cram all off it down to a stereo mix, in fact I’m surprised they ever managed to get it all in.
