my bloody valentine - loveless

Once upon a time (aka about a month and a half ago), in the middle of a Lester Bangs headrush of ironic bullshit rock writing (RIP you goddamn genius you), I decided to rant about how Isn't Anything was better than Loveless for some goddamn bullshit hipster reason like songwriting, I don't even remember. The point is it was total bullshit.

Loveless is the greatest album of all-time.

This leaves me in quite a predicament. What's more hipster, thinking Loveless is the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity, or thinking Isn't Anything is the better album just because everyone loves Loveless so fucking much? It's quite the hipster conundrum. All I know is, on about my dozenth listen to Loveless, it suddenly hit me what an unbelievably beautiful album it was, and how it was miles ahead any of the other bullshit I listened to, and how "Sometimes" was a more goddamn perfect song than I would ever find the words to describe in my entire life, and how the entire album is nothing but pedals and power chords but it's just so goddamn perfect regardless, there are just no words to describe it.

The first song to hit me was "When You Sleep." It was the "oh" part in the first verse, followed by the "once in a while," a sort of one-two punch that made me realize what a total jackass I had been for never actually listening to this album, even though I had heard it a million times.

Interesting sidenote--I'm willing to bet there are millions, MILLIONS of people just like me who have heard this song a million times and called it their hipster bible and all that bullshit but have never actually listened to the music, never actually listened beyond the initial wall of noise with the mumbled shitty mixed-down lyrics and improbable guitar effects and indifferent extra instruments. That makes me sad.

That song actually made me cry, when every other time I had heard it, it was just another sub-par filler track until "Come In Alone," which is still a fucking fantastic song but isn't even close to being the best song on Loveless, let alone one of my favorite songs of all-time.

What lead me to the whole "favorite album of all-time" business when it used to be my second favorite My Bloody Valentine album is the fact that this is the only album I can listen to all the way through and enjoy every fucking second of it. Other albums come close--OK Computer, Songs About Fucking, In an Aeroplane Over the Sea (yes I'm fucking serious), the Downward Spiral, 69 Love Songs, Bee Thousand, etc., etc.--for all of them, no matter how amazing they are, I reach a point where I have to force myself to finish the album. With Loveless, once I start it, I finish it every fucking time.

So I don't know where I'm going with this. I suppose I'm trying to say that I'm a fucktard for saying Isn't Anything is the better album, and anybody who makes a similar claim is just as stupid as me. (Incidentally, I don't support the use of the word fucktard at any time, in any situation.) Listening to "Sometimes," it makes me think that life is worth living after all, and that I should just open up to the fucking world, letting the dissonance between chords fuel my daily existence, stirring the pots that need to be stirred, saying the things that need to be said, reaching out and telling D E R L R and C all the things I want to tell them, all the things I can't tell them as much as I want to, all the things this song tells me I just need to fucking let out.

I know this is just a bunch of rambling bullshit. But compare this to the rambling bullshit I came up with listening to Isn't Anything, and YOU tell me which is the better album.

my bloody valentine - isn't anything

With the release of Loveless in 1991, the fate of Isn't Anything as the second-best MBV album was seemingly sealed. On the surface, Loveless is clearly the superior album--the lush drone effects and otherworldly guitar sounds that drench the album make it unlike any record before or after it, and combined with the myths of year-long studio sessions that bankrupted their record company to back it up, it has gone down in the indie history books as a masterpiece. As it should have. It's a brilliant album.

In recent years, as a result of the subcultural phenomenon known as hipster irony, it's become commonplace to rate Isn't Anything above Loveless, simply because it's the uncool thing to do, which makes it really cool. In reality, however, Isn't Anything really is the better album. (I am slowly coming around to the fact that I'm a massive hipster, so you can take that claim with an admittedly deserved massive grain of salt.)

Both albums are the crowning achievements of the shoegaze genre, which they all but created. Both albums took feedback and combined it with standard pop songwriting in a way it had never been done before. Both albums are absolutely required listening, regardless of the reigning opinions of either.

Isn't Anything simply has something Loveless lacks: SONGS. Somewhere along the tedious, chaotic production line of Loveless, the songs themselves became lost in tides of feedback and fuzz and the tangled webs of pedals and knobs that create the racket that engulfs the entire record. The songs became tracks, objects to be worked on and layered and fine-tuned to death. And it's pretty and it's impressive and frankly I love listening to it, but Isn't Anything achieves a similar effect which much, much much less effort.

Where Loveless is fuzz, Isn't Anything is noise, plain and simple. The ratcheted off-tune guitar playing and sweeping guitar textures compliment the songs, not bury them. The vocals aren't buried under mountains of ethereal fuzz, the structures aren't reduced mere vehicles for the sonic onslaught, and by god, there's NOISE. There's a girl singing and the guitar is creating a wonderful dissonant moan and it sounds like SHIT. Glorious, glorious, SHIT.

That's what feedback was meant to be, wasn't it? Just a means of pissing off the folks and filtering out the people who just didn't get it. Then Loveless came around, and suddenly that same deafening, soul-destroying, virginity-stealing squall became pretty. PRETTY. PLEASANT even. Well fuck that. Isn't Anything takes the same radical concept of Loveless, making pop songs based on feedback, and keeps true to its roots. "Lose My Breath" is a gorgeous song, absolutely breathtaking, but at it's core, it sounds like shit. That right there is Kevin Shields' vision, not that other shit.

I know what you're thinking: Loveless sounds like shit too, asshole, so shut your hipster mouth. Well you little prick, it's not the same and you know it. It's overblown, it's overdone, it's GOOD, and I can't fucking stand it. It's a betrayal of everything I know to be true in music. It can't hurt and feel good at the same time--it's supposed to feel good BECAUSE it hurts. The first ten seconds of "I Can See It (But I Can't Feel It)" will empty a room full of normal people listening to normal music, because the guitars are out of whack and it just doesn't sound good, which is the POINT. The chorus kicks in and sounds phenomenal and almost ruins it for me, almost, but there's still that whiny feedback in the back shooting off sparks and burning anyone with normal ears who still dares to come close. IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE BAD, DAMN IT. STOP RUINING IT FOR THE REST OF US BY MAKING IT GOOD.