100 Greatest Songs of the 90’s #65 My Bloody Valentine – only shallow

Released : 1991

Great works of art are still finished. The Sistine Chapel ceiling took Michaelangelo four years, but he got it done. Klimt’s The Kiss? two. The First Days of Spring? Dali had it all brushed up inside twelve months.

Yet some records never feel that way. Sometimes their creators get bored, sometimes even when they’re done, they’re not (Ask Lee Mavers about The La’s, if you can find him). The process by which My Bloody Valentine’s second album Loveless was recorded took, depending who’s being quoted, between eighteen months and two years and involved the use of nineteen different studios. MBV’s Kevin Shields had initially told Creation label supremo Alan McGee in early 1989 that he should expect everything to be completed in five days.

Shields and McGee’s relationship disintegrated after Creation were latterly forced into bankruptcy. But against all possible odds, Loveless was a record so completely dislocated from anyone else’s time and space that it defied critical gravity. At first it’s like hearing music through an aural fog until the initial discomfort of being in someone else’s head goes. only shallow was/is it’s opener, a scissoring, effect laden piece of shamanism which somehow brought the ear hammering experience of seeing the band live into bedrooms everywhere. Massive, tiny, lost, discovered, it was an epic beginning to a psychedelic, weed-hazed journey without precedent. It was great art – finished, but never ending.