Speaking in total and complete bias, this is the greatest record ever made. Stepping back slightly, even if you don’t subscribe to my own particular slant, _Loveless_ is in many ways a culminating experience. Drawing on everything from the Beach Boys at their most lush to the most punishing noise freakouts around, both this album and its accompanying, mindblowing tour from the group have deservedly become something close to legend, especially since MBV’s leader Kevin Shields can’t or won’t create a follow-up (now nine years and counting).

So what makes this album so thrilling? Hard to easily or specifically say. An illustrative point might help — the first time I heard “Soon,” its last, climactic track, I was playing it thanks to a random recommendation from a friend at the radio station I worked at. I remember starting the song playing, I remember it ending, but I literally can’t recall a single thing about the time in between. It’s not a question of forgetfulness, but awe — I was stunned by the music, flat out *gone*. I was standing there but unable to move, react. Nothing ever did that for me beforehand and nothing has since, and while I don’t expect anyone else to react quite the same way I did, it shows you why I hold it in such worth.

I had the chance to interview Shields a few years after this album came out, and the sense of how it was created became a little clearer. On the one hand, it’s a simpler album than might be thought — the vaunted ‘glide guitar’ effect talked about was simply him fooling around with the tremelo on his guitar and doing appropriate overdubs. But if what he did was seemingly simple, the end result was something else entirely. Forebears he named or others deduced included Wire, Sonic Youth, the Jesus and Mary Chain, but the end was much greater than the sum of its parts.

All well and good, but what does it sound like, comes the cry. Everything from brute electric noise to pop hooks, with glazed, melting, collapsing feedback, here, there, everywhere. Buried vocals, sometimes sickly sweet, sometimes bubbling up through the murk. Straightforward rhythms, hidden buried clattering. Songs as songs are thought of are minimal, with the images, the impressions, the ideas of what the lyrics might be more important than the lyrics themselves, the hooks unexpected. Sometimes it sounds like full orchestras are playing and other points nothing is there at all. “Soon” hotwires a shuffling funk/hip-hop to endless surges of sounds, spiralling up and up, an eternal ascent to heaven, while “Sometimes” consists of little more than soft singing, a background crunch that sounds like an endless wave. 

I could go on, but hopefully this serves as a portal to finding out more yourself. I’ve resisted the usual tags placed on MBV — shoegazing, post-punk, post-rock, whatever — precisely because I’m not interested in categorizing this band or this album. _Loveless_ is an experience of sound, of sonics, of a band taking roots and transforming them utterly.