Loveless (album) - Music

Music

While Butcher contributed about a third of the album's lyrics, most of the music on Loveless was written and performed by Shields. Shields stated, "I'm actually the only musician on the record except for the Colm song ." Shields assumed Butcher's guitarist duties during the recording process; Butcher admitted that she had not minded because she felt she "was never a great guitarist". Bassist Debbie Googe did not perform on the album, though she received a credit on the album sleeve. Googe said, "At the beginning I used to go down most days but after a while I began to feel pretty superfluous so I went down less." Butcher explained, "for Kevin to actually translate to Debbie what he had in his head and play it right would have been an agonizing process." "It wasn't collaborative at all", Alan Moulder said of the album's recording. "Kevin had a clear view of what he wanted, but he never explained it."

Loveless was largely recorded in mono sound, as Shields felt it important that the album's sound consisted of "the guitar smack bang in the middle and no chorus, no modulation effect". Shields wavers his guitar's tremolo bar as he strums, which contributes, in part, to the band's distinctive sound. This technique—nicknamed "Glide guitar"—causes the guitar strings to bend slightly in and out of tune. Shields said that due to his use of the tremolo bar, "People were thinking it's hundreds of guitars, when it's actually got less guitar tracks than most people's demo tapes have." The guitarist asserted that unlike other bands of the shoegazing movement of the early 1990s, My Bloody Valentine did not use chorus or flanger pedals. He insisted, "No other band played that guitar like me We did everything solely with the tremolo arm". Shields aimed to use "very simple minimal effects" which often were the result of involved studio work. He stated, "The songs are really simply structured. A lot of them are purposely like that. That way you can get away with a lot more when you mess around with the contents". In a 1992 Guitar World interview, Shields described how he achieved a sound akin to a wah-wah pedal on "I Only Said" by playing his guitar through an amplifier with a graphic equaliser preamp. After recording the track, he then bounced it to another track through a parametric equaliser while he adjusted the EQ levels manually. The interviewer asked if Shields could have achieved the same effect easier by simply using a wah-wah pedal, to which the guitarist replied, "In attitude toward sound, yes. But not in approach."

All but two of the drum tracks are composed of samples performed by drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig. Because Ó Cíosóig was suffering from physical and personal problems during the album's recording, samples of various drum patterns that he was able to perform in his condition were recorded. According to Shields, "t's exactly what Colm would have done, it just took longer to do." Ó Cíosóig recovered enough to play live on two of the albums' songs, "Only Shallow" and "Touched", the latter of which was composed and performed entirely by the drummer. Shields believes that listeners are unable to tell the difference between Ó Cíosóig's live drumming and the drum loops aside from the tracks intended to have an obviously "sampled" sound, like the dance-oriented "Soon". The album makes extensive use of samples, with Shields stating, "Most of the samples are feedback. We learnt from guitar feedback, with lots of distortion, that you can make any instrument, any one that you can imagine".

The vocals, handled jointly by Shields and Butcher, are kept relatively low in the mix, and are for the most part highly-pitched. On occasion Shields sang the higher register and Butcher the lower one. According to Shields, because the band had spent so long working on the album's vocals, he "couldn't tolerate really clear vocals, where you just hear one voice", thus "it had to be more like a sound." Butcher explained her "dreamy, sensual" style vocals, saying, "Often when we do vocals, it's 7:30 in the morning; I've usually just fallen asleep and have to be woken up to sing." To aid this effect, Shields and Ó Cíosóig even sampled Butcher's voice and reused it as instrumentation. The layered vocals on "When You Sleep" were born out of frustration with trying to get the right take. Shields commented that "The vocals sound like that because it became boring and too destructive trying to get the right vocal. So I decided to put all the vocals in" (it had been sung 12 or 13 times). The lyrics are deliberately obscure; Shields joked that he once considered rating various attempts to decipher the words on the band's website according to a percentage of accuracy. He claims that he and Butcher "spent way more time on the lyrics than ever on the music". The words were often written in late-night eight to ten hour-long sessions before the pair were due to record the vocals. The pair worked diligently to ensure the lyrics were not lackluster, even though few changes actually resulted; Shields said, "There's nothing worse than bad lyrics."