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 Keep It Simple
Van Morrison
Roger McGuinn @ the Huntington IMAC, Long Island, NY - April 4, 2008
Emily Saxe @ the Allen Room/Jazz at Lincoln Center - April 5, 2008
Another Country
Tift Merritt
Be Your Own Pet
Get Awkward
Paul McCartney – The McCartney Years (DVD)
Juno – Music from the Motion Picture
Various Artists
Yes - Their Definitive Story
Day and Night Driving
Seven Mary Three
InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
Huntington, NY
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Loveless -
My bloody eardrums would be more appropriate.
Based on reviews by other critics who have raved about this band, I’ve been meaning to buy this CD for years. For some reason, I just never got around to it until now. It took me fourteen years (!), and I finally own a copy of “Loveless”. The question now is, what should I do with it? To be honest, I am completely baffled by the disparity of what I’m hearing and what I expected. If I had been attentive, I could have derived a clue from the CD cover, which displays a hot magenta-red tinted, blurry photograph of a guitar, as if Satan himself was playing it.
In ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine, critic Ira Robbins (whom I respect immensely) described the album thusly upon its release: “The surges of Loveless send the listener falling weightlessly through space, a fantastic journey of sudden perspective shifts and jagged audio asteroids. In My Bloody Valentine's magical kingdom, cacophony is the mind-altering path to beauty.” Just this year, the same magazine included “Loveless” as one of the top 500 albums of all time, so I just HAD to buy it.
Sounds great, right? I mean, if an album can provide a “mind-altering path to beauty”, then what is there not to love? After all this time, I expected something truly transcendent. So, what were my first impressions?
If Enya took wild drugs and became psychopathic, she might sound like this.
If Phil Spector was even more insane, he might produce a record like this.
If the Cocteau Twins hummed while blaring Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music,” it would sound almost exactly like this.
Track after track after track, “Loveless” sounds like a taped collection of well-tuned chainsaws hacking their way through thirty guitars at the bottom of a deep well, while a faint drum rhythm pretends to hold the cacophony in check. Add in the sound of a marauding herd of elephants, and voila! My Bloody Valentine.
Trying to discern any meaning is almost as pointless as trying to discern any of the lyrics, which lie buried beneath the sound of seventy screeching guitars. As an art project, there is no doubt that “Loveless” is an interesting project. It is hard to imagine that something so god-awfully noisy could actually convey even a hint of melody. The constructions are clever, too, with interesting timing shifts that disorient, and then suddenly resolve. I’m fascinated that this much noise could be tamed into something musical, but it is also the most relentlessly dense collection of sounds that I have ever heard in my entire life. Fourteen years on, the sheer audacity of “Loveless” is still intact, but any implicit recommendation should also come with a consumer warning, and a hefty dose of aspirin.
Grade: 
 
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