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My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Loveless’: still awesome backwards
05.21.2015
09:34 am
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Surely you know by now whether or not My Bloody Valentine’s pivotal Loveless album is in your zone. When it dropped in November of 1991—just as Nevermind was temporarily blurring the line between mainstream and underground—I was in the thick of my college years, and the gauzy, gooey, heavy, trippy Loveless was completely unparalleled as a soundtrack for having sex, getting high as fuck, and having high-as-fuck sex.

Famously, it took band leader Kevin Shields two years to assemble the album’s dense mass of sounds that often defy their guitar origins, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether any given sound or even any sung phrase is as performed or the result of post-production studio manipulation. So when an adventurous fan posted the album backward in its entirety, it was a given that it was going to sound a whole hell of a lot like the album forward. But listening to it backwards subverts the album’s two and a half-ish decades of utter familiarity, and I rather enjoyed hearing it that way.

And I had to wonder if this inspired the idea, but it was posted two weeks after the backwards album was, so it may well be the other way around, if not just coincidence:
 

 
(That Twitter feed, by the way, is fun to follow if shoegaze in-jokes are your bag.)

Backward Loveless was posted by NeutralMilkHotelArchive, who describes his/her YouTube channel as “An archive for all Neutral Milk Hotel. Formerly a channel for reversed music,” though it boasts only two NMH shows so far compared to two dozen pieces of reversed music, 7 of which are by Bach. If you’re going to get all high to listen to backward Loveless anyway, it couldn’t hurt to peruse that channel for further fodder, no?
 

 
More backwards MBV after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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05.21.2015
09:34 am
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