It was 1994. I was reading an interview with Jason Martin. He was giving the brief story of how his band, Starflyer 59, came to be. Silver had been released less than a year before. His EP, She is The Queen, had just come out. I had become quite fond of both. In the article Martin mentions the influence of My Bloody Valentine on his music. Interesting.
I was in the Columbia House Music Club (membership was still rampant in the 90’s). I flipped through the pamphlet of monthly musical selections, no Bloody. I went to my bookshelf where I kept the yearly exhaustive catalogue of albums, no Bloody. I remembered the cook at the cantina where I bused tables, telling me that he would refuse the obligatory monthly selection and simply (or perhaps, not so simply) write Columbia House a letter requesting the order numbers of the albums that he wanted to buy. I went to my desk and composed a textbook business letter; complete with return address, date, inside address, salutation, body, complimentary close, and signature. I took a drake mallard stamp out of my parents desk and a few weeks later I unwrapped the out-of-focus, pink-filtered, close-up of a hand strumming an electric guitar—Loveless. It felt foreign in my hand.
My immediate reaction was aversion. It was spacey—otherworldly. Part of me wanted to turn it off, to accept defeat. I had bit off more than I could palate. Yet, others liked it? There had to be something there to discover. Either they were crazy for liking it or I was crazy for rejecting it. I decided to press on. I pushed my way through Loveless’ dizzying sonance dozens of times in the next few days. The sounds seemed stretched—every instrument manipulated beyond distinction. It droned. It lingered. It smoldered. It was as if the disk was lagging; yet the songs seemed fast. It was fire, burning under water.
Within a week it had me. Anytime my mind would wander throughout the day it would dead end at Come in Alone or Sometimes. Those melodies would find me. They would stalk me with haunting resonance. There are other albums that I replayed frequently because I liked them, because I enjoyed them, because they were easy and comfortable. Loveless was the first album that had ever courted me—that ever pursued me—that summoned me to listen. And it didn’t just want the time that I spent listening to it. It wanted every wasted thought, every idle moment. If there were space, its melodies would squeeze through. Loveless took time to dissipate. It took time to digest. It was thick and layered. It crept in slowly over many listens.
The vocals were slurred and hidden. Lyrics were as indefinable as the instrumentation. In fact, at times, they were indistinguishable from the instrumentation. And, yet, they were unforgettable—resonating, following, predatorial. You could neither forget them nor remember them entirely. But the melodies imposed themselves even without lyric comprehension: somehow that was acceptable. It was lyrical without narrative. It was so unique and incantatory that you could get something out of it without knowing exactly what it was saying or doing.
How could something that was initially so contrary to my instincts and so unapproachable in its intonation and attitude become so loveable, so lovely. In Loveless the shrill sounds of sirens whose intentions are seemingly vague and frightening become comforting, intimate whispers that in the end, hold you—warm and spellbound.
