Loveless: Classic or Not That Classic

That's a great cover of When You Sleep.

WATER TOWER FRONT MAN, KENNY FEINSTEIN RELEASES DEBUT SOLO ALBUM, LOVELESS: HURTS TO LOVE, A RE-MAKE OF THE CLASSIC MY BLOODY VALENTINE ALBUM, LOVELESS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sfGEXhvY-8

Front man for Portland, Oregon-based roots-bluegrass-punk outfit, Water Tower, Kenny Feinstein will release his debut solo album, Loveless: Hurts To Love, a tribute to My Bloody Valentine, on Portland, Oregon-based Fluff & Gravy Records September 17, 2013. The record, which contains all eleven tracks from the My Bloody Valentine classic, plus the track "Swallow" from their 1991 Tremolo EP, released nine months prior to Loveless on Creation Records, finds Feinstein paying homage to his favorite record, while not just covering it, but re-creating it with acoustic guitar, mandolin, dobro, fiddle, and dulcimer.

This sounds horrible! Fuck that dude.

And it should be noted that Japancakes got there first

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000UTOQPG

the two songs I've played so far sound like someone fundamentally misunderstanding This Mortal Coil

don't cover me, dobro

Jesus that is comically bad. If it's a pisstake, hats off indeed.

http://blurtonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Kenny-Feinstein.jpg

listened to this album recently... it kinda doesn't hold up. sounds bad now. i remember when it sounded good to me.

actually it's good

I really love the 30-second whale song thing, "To Here Knows When", and "Blown a Wish". I wish the rest of the album sounded like those songs but they all try to rock too hard. I like my shoegazer music to be more slow and druggy, that's why I prefer Slowdive to MBV myself.

i am starting to like mbv almost as much as loveless. "in another way" is better than anything off loveless.

http://devonrecordclub.com/2015/01/16/my-bloody-valentine-loveless-round-77-nicks-choice/

i am starting to like mbv almost as much as loveless. "in another way" is better than anything off loveless.
the 1st sentence is otm. but then i'd say "only tomorrow" is the best song they have ever done.

Classic, of course.

What never seems to get mentioned about Loveless is that the songs themselves are actually incredibly well-written.

wouldnt go that far. sometimes theyre just written well enough (thinking of "come in alone" here, probably my least favorite track on the album and where the album loses momentum for me).

(love this album to death, but that song doesnt hold up well just on its own)

happy birthday!

Where were YOU 25 years ago?

In some pub in Luxembourg. Probably the English Pub in the Grund. When Glider came out the year before, they often played "Soon" in the Blitz in the centre. People were dancing on the window sills.

Did I get "Bandwagonesque" that same day? I think I did... Good day, that.

Bought the cassette at Rebel Rebel (RIP) on Bleecker St., NYC. Drove around with a friend blasting it. Thought my tape was warped lol.

i discovered this mid-late-90s on allmusic and bought it the same day at Media Play. that album cover is just too cool to pass up.

still holds up imo, and i have yet to hear a shoegaze record this good and this surprising. MBV comes really really close though...

One of the absolute best albums.

Drums still sound like shit. I could tell they were triggered/sample-replaced and probably spliced up to the point you're not really hearing a human performance even before I read something that confirmed my suspicions

Team Isn't Anything.

dunno why anyone would put on MBV and expect to hear Parquet Courts

I stopped by HMV on the way to work where I played the CD several times on a new-fangled device we were testing called a CD-ROM drive.

<3 this album so much. very important to me

Bought it at Kim's Underground. Brought it home. Wondered what all the fuss was about. Still do. Nice album, shouldn't have changed the world. I'm pretty sure I bought a few other CDs that day that I liked better.

classic

Inoffensive but just a bit shit, really.

Ok, yeah, Trompe Le Monde, Laughing Stock, Bandwagonesque, Yourself Is Steam, She Hangs Brightly, Perfect Sound Forever, Sebadoh III, White Light From The Mouth of Infinity, Distant Plastic Trees, Real Ramona, Eye (from the year before), Blake Babies (from the year before) all seemed more important at the time. And. Still. Do.

i was in the midst of battling a crippling depression and this record was like a warm cozy blanket i could retreat to. it's still amazing how they managed to make a wall of freaky guitars sound so welcoming.

beautiful guitar sounds

compositions themselves are a little lacking

a few good tracks

7/10 for effort

saying the drums suck on this or these songs actually aren't very good songs seems like entirely missing the point.

I don't think this is a popular choice, but "Loomer" has always been my favourite on this album. One of the simplest tracks and totally perfect.

saying the drums suck on this or these songs actually aren't very good songs seems like entirely missing the point.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Friday, November 4, 2016 11:00 AM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the drum thing is especially stupid because the only time they're high enough in the mix to discern their "suckiness" or whatever is in the first 3 seconds of the first track

beautiful guitar sounds

compositions themselves are a little lacking

a few good tracks

7/10 for effort

honestly years ago I had the same effusive opinions as everybody else but these days this'd be about 2/3 of my opinion. I think all the tracks are at least pretty good and would still give it a 9 because the overall effect remains a great listen and if any given track comes up on the radio it's always welcome -- and, honestly, I think this is a hidden feature of this album. its songs, if heard in another context, always leap out: "now that's something different." the only way it might be otherwise if if your mix/show was entirely people/bands who'd been influenced by this album.

but I think it's fair to say that the actual songwriting is the weak point here and "well, the lyrics aren't the point" is always a cop-out when lyrics aren't on the level of the rest. like, yeah the lyrics aren't the point, but there's a whole lot of music out there that goes the extra mile and throws in some good lyrics ~whether they're the point or not~

yeah it's almost analogous to the straw thrown by people who rail against audiophile pressings and stuff... it's not like "everything that doesn't go the extra mile is bad", it's "stuff that goes the extra mile is good"

In an interview with The Quietus prior to MBV's release, Shields said the album was "not going to sound like Loveless where it's like looking into another world ... more like Isn't Anything, where it seems to be of this world, but with one foot in another world ... the songs on Loveless had more in common with folk-blues music to me, just a verse and an instrumental passage, circular" and described the new material as "more elongated" and "raw." The Beach Boys' unfinished album Smile was an influence on the composition. According to Shields, he "wanted to see what would happen if I worked in a more impressionistic way, so that it only comes together at the end." He later expanded on his comments, stating that he was "purposefully not trying to write songs with a beginning, middle, and end."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBV_(album)

See, I don't know that better lyrics would make this album better. I think it's an important feature of this album that the lyrics don't draw attention to themselves. You can't always make them out, and the ones you can make out have a kind of hazy generality. There's never any lyric that stops your attention. I feel like that's part of what makes everything flow together.

the lyrics are there for the sounds alone imo. i don't think i learned a single lyric until needed to learn the keyboard part to "When You Sleep" for a house show. the vocals being so whispery and abstract was a huge deal.

"Loomer" so great!

not Wall of Sound, Mash Potatoes of Sound.

the lyrics to this album have never bothered me because i've never been able to understand almost any of them

I've got a confession to make, I've never heard this album. FP me now.

All time best records/songs/lyrics you've never heard

the lyrics to this album have never bothered me because i've never been able to understand almost any of them

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, November 4, 2016 12:32 PM (forty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right, my argument isn't that we should dock this album points for not having great lyrics, it's that great lyrics are a bonus because the vast majority of lyrics are shit

lyrics in general i mean, w/r/t to my second clause there

ymmv, i suck deal with it caveat etc