Loveless (album) - Legacy

Legacy

Despite being poised for a "popular breakthrough" following Loveless' critical favour, My Bloody Valentine have recorded only sporadically since the album's release, including the contribution of a cover of a James Bond theme song to a charity compilation, and a cover of the Wire song "Map Ref. 41 Degrees N 93 Degrees W" for the tribute album Whore: Tribute to Wire. Unable to finalise a third album, Shields isolated himself and, in his own words, went "crazy", drawing comparisons in the music press to the behavior of musicians such as Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd. The other band members went their own ways during the period of inactivity following Loveless: Butcher contributed vocals to Collapsed Lung's 1996 single "Board Game", Googe had been sighted working as a cab driver in London and formed the supergroup Snowpony in 1996, Ó Cíosóig joined Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions, while Shields collaborated with Yo La Tengo, Primal Scream and Dinosaur Jr.

Reportedly, two separate albums of new music were recorded by Shields in his home studio, but were abandoned. According to sources, one was possibly influenced by jungle music. Shields later confirmed that at least one full album of new material was abandoned. He said, "We did an album's worth of half-finished stuff, and it did just get dumped, but it was worth dumping. It was dead. It hadn't got that spirit, that life in it." He later explained, "I just stopped making records myself, and I suppose that must just seem weird to people. 'Why'd you do that?' The answer is, it wasn't as good . And I always promised myself I'd never do that, put out a worse record." However, Shields later said to Magnet magazine, "We are 100 per cent going to make another My Bloody Valentine record unless we die or something," and attributed the band's sparse output to a lack of inspiration. In 2007 Shields announced that the band had reunited and that a new album they had started recording in 1996 was "3/4th finished."

Loveless's influence has grown with time, and the album has impacted a wide variety of other artists. Music critic Jim DeRogatis wrote in Turn On Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock that "the forward-looking sounds of this unique disc have positioned the band as one of the most influential and inspiring bands since the Velvet Underground." Brian Eno has praised the album and said, regarding the song "Soon", that "t set a new standard for pop. It's the vaguest music ever to have been a hit." Robert Smith of The Cure discovered Loveless after a period of almost exclusively listening to "disco, or Irish bands like the Dubliners" as a means of avoiding his contemporaries, and said, " was the first band I heard who quite clearly pissed all over us, and their album Loveless is certainly one of my all-time three favourite records. It's the sound of someone who is so driven that they're demented. And the fact that they spent so much time and money on it is so excellent." Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins told Spin, "It's rare in guitar-based music that somebody does something new At the time, everybody was like, 'How the fuck are they doing this?' And, of course, it's way simpler than anybody would imagine." Corgan later recruited Alan Moulder to co-produce the Pumpkins' album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995). Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who praised the album's musical diversity and production, also worked with Moulder on the third Nine Inch Nails studio album, The Fragile. Trey Anastasio of jam band Phish believed that "Loveless the best album recorded in the '90s", and wanted his band to cover the album in its entirety for a Halloween show. Robert Pollard of indie rock band Guided by Voices acknowledged the album as a source of inspiration, noting, "Sometimes when I want to write lyrics, I'll listen to Loveless. Because of the way the vocals are buried, you can almost listen to the songs as if they're instrumental pieces." Loveless has also been said to have made a considerable influence on the career of British band Radiohead, particularly influencing the band's textured guitar sound. Instrumental band Japancakes covered the album in its entirety on Loveless (2007), replacing vocals with steel guitar and distortion with a clean sound.