Sometimes, Loveless: Annivyrsary 1991
ISSUE #144
In 1991, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine spent three years making their second record, held up by perfectionism and his visionary sound—thousands of pedals to make the guitars shimmer, a mirage of pitch-bent tremolo effects. In headphones, it swirls like the arms of another galaxy, its pulsars beaming through clouds of space dust. The album, called Loveless, cost $500,000 and all but bankrupted their record label.
An aurora reached as far south as Pennsylvania that year, part of the largest solar flare ever recorded. The Loveless vocals were taped beneath this flare, a poetic mirror for an artistic firestorm—destruction justified by its beautiful result. It could have easily burnt out in folly.
They followed the album’s release with one of the loudest tours in the world. I dream of hearing “Sometimes” at its fullest, bone-deep volume, a song that always gives me that end-of-night feeling—a sensation now caked in memory’s dust. Even now, it pulls me like a trap-door lever and drops me like the floor in the Tower of Terror. It's a fall so far that my stomach forgets and recalibrates to accept each added g-force.
That tour tested the ears of every room they played. "After about thirty seconds the adrenaline set in, people are screaming and shaking their fists,” wrote music critic Mark Kemp in his book on the label. “After a minute you wonder what's going on. After another minute it's total confusion. The noise starts hurting. The noise continues. After three minutes you begin to take deep breaths. After four minutes, a calm takes over.”
Sitting, alone, trying to crack this essay, this quote struck me as what it’s been like to live through this year. I’ve been forgetting common words. Losing daily trains of thought. Mixing up every “there” and “your.” I have cleaned out my mind’s closet and found only buzzing—a single dimming light bulb and moths that lick the glass.
I am like Ben Gunn of Treasure Island, lost of mind from being left at sea. It makes me reconsider all of our space movies. We get it wrong—conjure up luxuries like cryosleep or fail to imagine a single mental consequence. But there’s little as deafening as the buzz of the mind. It wasn’t made to face this stretching void.
I await my own cryosleep, suit in the closet, approaching our system’s burning bulb. It has been so long since I’ve been a passenger. So long since my forehead's pressed to the window’s glass. To blur the stars with my breathing fog. To trust in another’s hands on the wheel. To sleep knowing someone will be there to wake me.
1984 has been called the greatest year in pop, and I think it might still be true. If 1974 was music’s fallow period, ten years later was its opposite. We danced in the dark beneath the killing moon and under purple rain—this was the year the critics and the people met in the Minneapolis streets.