My Bloody Valentine - loveless (1991)

My Bloody Valentine was the one band to push the shoegaze sound to it's limits. The other was Slowdive. Loveless was their grand statement.

"Only Shallow" was a dream-pop dissevered with monstrous fuzz acid-rock outbursts. In "Loomer", their dream-pop became an amorphous toxic fuzz cloud. Then, after the loop intermezzo "Touched", "To Here Knows When" rose triumphantly like purging steam towards the sky; essentially this was the previous amorphous cloud having gotten rid of the fuzz and vocals, and having transubstantiated higher in the stratosphere to pure ethereal ecstatic sound.

When compared to these bold sonic experiments, "When You Sleep" was classic shoegaze (i.e. fuzz ridden dream-pop). Again, from this relatively standard moment, "I Only Said" exploded with giant whirlwinds of pure soaring, melodic, spiritual elation; if new-age music relaxed the spirit, then My Bloody Valentine's music washed off the spirit with white light from heaven, uniting it with the great one in a dizzying nirvana.

And again, this was followed by a more normal shoegaze track, "Come In Alone", which also reminded of 60's psychedelia. "Sometimes" was also fairly standard, though aided by a superb melody and a more pensive tone. The ectoplasmic nature of their music returned with "Blown A Wish", which was akin to a gospel floating in the airwaves in search of a heaven. And finally, in "What You Want" they merged their two guises: one, the superb shoegaze pop-psychedelia and, two, the impalpable ecstatic harmonic structure.

A triumph.

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