The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by Cliff Hicks (@Devinoch) for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!

Where do you even begin with Loveless? It was the album that bankrupted Creation Records. Supposedly it cost around a quarter of a million pounds to make. (Bandleader/guitarist Kevin Shields argues the number's greatly exaggerated, and probably only cost 150k pounds.) It was such a record that My Bloody Valentine didn't release a follow up album for 22 years. Loveless took the better part of two years to make, and was recorded in almost twenty different studios. It gave half of the band tinnitus. But the end result, good lord. 

In 1982, Brian Eno said that while the Velvet Underground's first album sold only 30,000 copies in its early years, "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band." Well, early on, "Loveless" had only sold 100k copies or so, but nearly every person who bought one was either in a band, working in a studio, developing guitar pedals or writing about music. Loveless was the album pretty everyone was talking about from 1991 on, with people in other bands talking about their new albums, saying how much they'd been influenced by My Bloody Valentine. Critics were tripping over their own feet to heap praises on the record, with everyone from Rolling Stone to The Village Voice talking about how this was a record that everyone needed to own.

But how do you describe something that is truly hyped already? By telling the truth. If there is a pinnacle of the shoegaze movement, it truly is and will likely always be My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. Kevin Shields did things with guitars that nobody thought was possible, and he did it all in a way nobody saw coming. 

Shields has often said he never thought of himself as a gifted guitarist, lamenting his difficulty with changing complex fingerings on the fretboard quickly, but one thing Kevin Shields did know how to do was use his tremolo arm, commonly known as the whammy bar. If you aren't familiar with a tremolo arm, it's a bar that's attached to the base of the guitar strings, that lets the guitarist pull or push on the bar to bend all six strings together. Before Shields, the tremolo arm was almost exclusively used while lead guitar players were playing one or two notes at a time, to bend them. Shields decided, yeah, fuck that, and starting playing whole chords that way, warping them around while he played them, giving the music a giant woozy feel. He called it "glide guitar." 

This wasn't the only thing he did in studios, though. He sampled drums, guitars, bass, even vocals, and ran them through effects pedals, distorting and warping them further. He used amp feedback as an additional instrument. Vocals were recorded and mixed at low levels, to make them simply additional instruments instead of the foreground of any song. On one track in particular, "When You Sleep," Shields just layered all 12 takes of the vocals one on top of another, to make a hypnotic surreal voice.

Bassist Debbie Googe didn't play a single note on the album, but got credit for it anyway. Second guitarist and vocalist Belinda Butcher only sang. None of her guitar playing is on the record. The drums were mostly converted into samples and then constructed together, because drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig had physical problems during the recording of the record. In essence, 90% of what you hear on "Loveless" is all Kevin Shields. (All of the 57 second track "Touched" was written and performed by Ó Cíosóig. He also played live drums for the album's opener, the megalithic "Only Shallow," the album's second single.)

Anyone who's ever seen My Bloody Valentine live since the release of "Loveless" will tell you the exact same thing - never before or since have they been at a concert that fucking loud. When I saw them in San Francisco in 2008, at one of their first gigs since reuniting, earplugs were being mandatorily handed out to everyone entering the venue. The audio engineers were wearing airport earmuffs, the kinds of things you see people guiding 747s into their hangers wearing. I had professional grade earplugs, and during the show's climax, I even covered my plugged ears with my hands, to help manage the sound. I FELT the music as much as heard it.

All that said, what does Loveless actually sound like? Like glory. Like sunshine. Like sugar. Like a daydream slathered in neon, all slightly out of focus. Like being bathed in daylight after a lifetime of darkness. Like a perfect pop song flooded through overtaxed speakers into a cavernous room. Like a damaged mirror ball spinning, caught up in a rainbow.

From the open 1-2-3-4 drum hit into guitar shock that opens the album on "Only Shallow" to the trancey, dancey spiralling last few minutes of album closer "Soon," nothing has ever come even close to sounding as distinct and unique as My Bloody Valentine's magnum opus Loveless.

-Cliff Hicks (@Devinoch)