Loveless: The Death Knell of Rock?

You're telling me there haven't been any significant rock records made in the past fourteen years???

I am.

I don't find it disturbing or twisted at all!

x-post Kitaro's Kijiki, the death knell of New Age?

http://www.artistdirect.com/Images/Sources/AMGCOVERS/music/cover200/drc100/c146/c14601115tw.jpg→http://www.progreviews.com/reviews/images/Bore-VCN.jpg

The Dwarves - Thank Heaven for Little Girls
Pavement - Slanted and Enchanted
The Fall - Code: Selfish
The Mummies - The Mummies Play Their Own Records
The Night Kings - Increasing Our High
Ruins - Burning Stone
The Fall - The Infotainment Scan
Blue Humans - Clear to Higher Time
Stereolab - Transient Random Noise etc.
The Dwarves - Sugarfix
The Verlaines - Way Out Where
Royal Trux - Cats and Dogs
Stereolab - Mars Audiac Quintet
Lhasa Cement Plant - Return to Oblivion
Circle X - Celestial
The Dead C - Operation of the Sonne
Royal Trux - Thank You
The Fall - Cerebral Caustic
The Dead C - The White House
Monoshock - Walk to the Fire
VON LMO - Red Resistor
Stereolab - Emperor Tomato Ketchup

God, I almost wish I didn't really enjoy Loveless right now.

My two cents as per significant rock albums:

Converge - Jane Doe

x post

BC: Sure. But my whole thing is that people don't fall in love to Pavement, people don't get up in the morning before they go to school and put on Big Black. They put on Smashing Pumpkins or Hole or Nirvana, because these bands actually mean something to them. It's the difference between music you put on to take drugs to, and music you put on to live your life.

First of all, the notion that "new age" = "anything played on a guitar that isn't based on power chords" is silly.

Also, the evolution of rock != reaching the "ideal" of rock. Take the example from my previous post -- just because reggae evolved from R&B and ska doesn't mean that reggae is automatically a higher art form than R&B and ska. It also doesn't mean that no great R&B and ska albums have been recorded since reggae came along.

x-post

????

I mean I want to come up with a finely-honed, carefully-balanced counter-argument, but M@tt H3lgeson (who's rapidly becoming one of my fave ILXors n/h) kinda nailed it upthread tbh

Trayce OTM!

I loved the Levitation album the moment it came out, championed it like mad, and was roundly mocked because at that point, prog was a joke and a no no.

It is sad they disappeared up Terry Bicker's arse, because they were brilliant.

Actually, Ned nailed it. Great post, illuminating both why Loveless was a brilliant, original forward-step for music and also a means to AUGMENT, rather than kill, rock.

Levitation weren't very proggy by "prog" standards fwiw, they come across now as a particularly loose and imaginative psych-pop outfit, more Verve than Yes. And yeah, Need For Not is super.

Aye, thats true. It's odd no one was interested in them at the time. I dont think it helped that Bickers is a complete fruitcake, but there you go.

Levitation have since been lumped in with the "pronk" "movement" (i.e. they were mates with C******s) but they were slightly atypical 90's skycaptains as far as I'm concerned. These days they get love from, er, C*******s fans, on one of whose albums Christian Hayes played. Didn't Bickers quit during a show?

Re: what I said above, I mean, Loveless, for all its controlled glory, wasn't an absolute. It was a 50-odd-minute piece of sonic juxtaposition which happened to concretise an apparently paradoxical noise-pop-bliss-indie rock ideal more convincingly than anything before it, and probably more coherently than anything since. It remains a definitive statement of musical intent. To suggest that it prevented the chances of any subsequent record making a statement of similar valency and thus an original piece of Rock Music worthy of the name is narrow-minded in the extreme. Loveless applied its own ends to rock instrumentation, and found an ideal that was entirely its own. Not an ideal that was ever Rock's. Rock is far too mercurial and elusive a quantity to be restricted in such a manner; it would insult Loveless to claim that it ever was. Loveless wasn't a funnel into which all Rock was poured; it was a loom into which sound was fed. Rock was at the loom's controls, not the substance being weaved therein.

...no, wait, MBV were at the controls of this particular loom, and Rock was the factory they lived in

if Rock was at the controls, then it would be seeking to create an ideal, whereas Rock does not do that, for it is a realm of multitudes, in which visionaries may build their dream-machines and then operate them

Loveless wasn't a funnel into which all Rock was poured; it was a loom into which sound was fed

Close; it was a rock album by a rock band.

Well, indeed, and I shouldn't overindulge in my own metaphorical horseplay, but what I meant by that analogy was that Loveless was a finely-crafted edifice WITHIN a large, variegated and multidirectional community, rather than a nodal point at which all Rock paused, looked at itself, took a deep breath, and recalculated its own values.

Huh?

90% of what I write is sound and fury, signifying nothing, or, in this case, the fact that Loveless isn't part of a wider rock metanarrative. Why I invented a metanarrative of sorts to illustrate this, I have no idea.

Er, I mean "isn't part of a UNIVERSAL rock metanarrative". There are *slightly* wider metanarratives (noise-pop, bliss-pop, advancement of guitar sonics) you could easily apply.

I get what you mean Loujag. It didn't come out of a vacuum. Nothing does.

Well maybe Jandek did. But anyway.

o wait maybe I didnt get what you meant.

It didn't come out of a vacuum. Nothing does.

except Bohemian Rhapsody ffs

*goes to bed*

It didn't come out of a vacuum. Nothing does.

except Bohemian Rhapsody ffs

It came out of a vacuum; let's hope it disappears into a black-hole.

xpost loool

Hahahah LJ nice selfpwn.

Why are Loveless threads always the worst?

― Curt1s St3ph3ns, Monday, July 25, 2005 6:15 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

So what happened now?

I like what J0hn is saying and there should be more of it.

Loveless was a finely-crafted edifice WITHIN a large, variegated and multidirectional community,

I agree.

rather than a nodal point at which all Rock paused, looked at itself, took a deep breath, and recalculated its own values.

And that album, according to typical rock canonization, would be Nevermind.

Actually, my hindsight agrees with this, in a more general sense. I dunno. At the time I remember Loveless being this OMG thing - but Isn't Anything had already done that (as had the first JAMC album), so that did it for alt rock.

Nevermind did it for chart rock.

BTW Ned I admire that this is clearly one of your most cherished ever albums but you can still be circumspect about its relevance within the overall scene without being precious about it at all. Thats why you are awesome!

When the album came out, the band openly thanked Sonic Youth for giving the electric guitar at least 10 more years of relevance (some print interview).

I thought the album was pretty when it came out. It still sounds pretty to me. I give it 4/5 stars. It's no 'Slanted & Enchanted,' which came out a few months later.

so rock's 'progression' is basically starting with a black guy talking about sex with guitars and a backbeat and then basically making it gradually more and more whiter until you have an Enya album.

― miccio (miccio), Sunday, May 29, 2005 5:23 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

Best ILM post ever.

one of the most appealing aspects of loveless to me is that it it is amazingly inspired and fully realised, yet at the same time the main source of influence it seems to draw upon is the singularity of the album's premise itself; its sense of daring and uniqueness, its ambition to sound completely unprecedented, and its desire to take rock music forward in advanced and challenging new ways, simultaneously acknowledging and shedding ties with music that came before it. the loveless sound has become a staple for disciples to digest, attempt to get a grip on and imitate, yet very few contemporary acts have the ability to invent new sounds convincingly and take bountiful steps towards shaping the direction of future rock music, at least not in the same assured way that MBV did almost two decades ago.

h8 2 break it 2 u guys, but they just had a lot of pedals

hahah

"Starpower," "Schizophrenia," and "Kotton Krown" were all recorded 3-4 years before Loveless came out.

True, but "Isnt Anything" came out at that time, and it blew me away, much more than Loveless ever did. But I have to say this: it wasn't because they were doing anything new for the genre... it was because they were doing something amazingly new for them!. Thats all the impact it ever had for me.

miccio's posts full of misguided prejudices against enya

I bet there were lots of people who never listened to SGT. Peppers at the time and even now that they are 65 wouldn't be able to figure out which rock songs were on it.

It's hilarious that some posters will go to such great lengths to downplay the uniqueness of "Loveless". Sometimes it's OK to simply claim that a record was inspiring and innovative -- many records are! -- i.e. one can find the middle ground between "the death knell of rock" and "LOL suckers Sonic Youth and Levitation were the TRUE innovators DO YOU SEE??"

You all know that Shepherd Moons was released on the same day as Loveless, right? Hell yeah I bought them both.

Mainly on the strength of this review:

Calling Loveless a near carbon copy of Isn't Anything puts it quite mildly. In general, My Bloody Valentine's own musical style and work remains the same, again assisted on production by Nick Robbins and with lyrics by Belinda Butcher. Loveless does have one key factor that's also carried over from Isn't Anything -- it's quite good listening. Though the total continuity means that those who enjoy their work will again be pleased and those who dislike it won't change their minds, in terms of finding their own vision and sticking with it, MBV have increasingly polished and refined their work to a strong, elegant degree. "Soon," the lead single, avoids repeating the successful formula of "Feed Me with Your Kiss" by means of its waltz time -- a subtle enough change, but one that colors and drives the overall composition and performance, the closest MBV might ever get to a dance number. Some songs call to mind traditional Irish music even more strongly than much of their earlier work, while two other tracks are haunting rearrangements of old, traditional rock numbers. With their trademark understated drama in full flow many other places, especially on the wonderful "To Here Knows When" (replaced on later pressings with an English language version done for the film Far and Away), MBV shows themselves to still have it, to grand effect.

lol

by means of its waltz time

hahahaha

Nicely done, that.

It's no 'Slanted & Enchanted,' which came out a few months later.

And for this I cannot be thankful enough.

It's hilarious that some posters will go to such great lengths to downplay the uniqueness of "Loveless". Sometimes it's OK to simply claim that a record was inspiring and innovative -- many records are! -- i.e. one can find the middle ground between "the death knell of rock" and "LOL suckers Sonic Youth and Levitation were the TRUE innovators DO YOU SEE??"

Barry, I don't think anyone here has denied that Loveless has unique qualities. However, the thread's premise goes quite a bit further than that. And that does seem ludicrous to some of us. (Levitation only ever came up as one example in a list of other bands that were doing interesting or innovative things.)

I don't think Loveless represents any kind of extreme or historical breaking point in terms of what can be done with electric guitar sound or electronic production in a rock context, let alone in terms of other aspects of rock such as song form or rhythm. In terms of its broader social impact, it seems marginal, especially outside the UK.

Having seen them live now, this album is a whole different thing.

wtf & this Pavement bullshit: Sure S&E combined tastefully-selected anachronistic shapes into a new hybrid, but Loveless invented a whole new type of shit. There is no comparison.

this is all just like, your opinion, maaaaaaan

maaaaaaan - Is this supposed to sound like Crispin Glover in The River's Edge, or Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now?

otto from the simpsons.

Thought it was from "The Big Lebowski"

oh shit you're right!