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My Bloody Valentine’s seminal, revered work “Loveless” is lots of things: a swirling miasma of sonic assault, the birth of the legend of Kevin Shields’ madness (which saw the record make its way through nineteen studios and damn near bankrupt its label), and a layered, and above all, loud approach to song-making. So I guess what it is more than anything is a good story, and we love those.
Shane’s sitting this one out with some sort of sickness, which is I guess what happens when your eardrums have been bled clean out and you have to lie down, lest you lose your proverbial shit. In his stead this week is our friend Phil Ajjarapu, who shares a story about eating cheese and crackers with BB King, about the difference between the way we soak things up in our youth (as opposed to when we’ve been worn down over time) and about the influence of this record that seems, in some ways, to be more than the sum of its parts.
Ryan rebounds from last week’s love-in with Yo La Tengo, just in time to wonder if he “gets” this LP, even though Shields’ seems to have recorded with at least one of his heroes, and perhaps more. We even wonder about the phenomenally bad idea of Trey Anastasio’s Phish covering this record in its entirety for Halloween (which, fortunately, didn’t happen), and press on about what makes a song work, and what it must be like to have to try to decipher and catalog lyrics you think you may have heard in a live recording session, and then transcribe so that whatever version of “tortured genius” (if you buy the platitudes) might live on.
That, and we talk about Skee-Lo, self effacing diminutive rap staple.
Somewhere along the way, Phil’s dog Molly eats a pencil in my garage.
