My Bloody Valentine (band)

"Loveless isn’t just an essential alternative rock album, it’s also one of the best albums of the 90s. It’s like an overwhelming out-of-body experience – transcendent beauty with a capital ‘trance’ – and its reinvention of sound, texture and mood in rock music sounds as radical now as it did in 1991. My Bloody Valentine spent two years in the studio perfecting [their] formula: a dizzying blend of roaring guitars and sensual vocals from Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher. Loveless is a classic that’s spawned many imitators but has no peer."

"You could say, shrewdly, that Loveless combines two main modalities of the ’90s by being the greatest rock album that is made almost entirely of samples—drum loops, guitar feedback, vocals, all sent through an Akai S1000, which could then be triggered from a keyboard—creating a singular melding of dream-pop and acid-house and hip-hop that defined a new genre called shoegaze. You could say its underlying philosophy remains as relevant as ever: that sleepiness is a largely underrated state of being, that our unconscious impulses are far more truthful than our conscious behavior, that the best music should feel like it could go on forever. You could say that its chief architect, Kevin Shields, is influenced by no one more than fellow Irishman Edmund Burke, the 18th-century philosopher who coined the Romantic ideals of beauty and sublime, and who wrote that the richest emotional response from art comes from the “terrible uncertainty” it can elicit."