Less Loved

My Bloody Valentine | Patti Smith and Kevin Shields

by M.J. Fine

It took shoegaze designers My Bloody Valentine two years, 19 studios and hundreds of thousands of dollars to record their second full-length, Loveless, which then set expectations so high they haven't been able to follow it. Even resident control freak Kevin Shields probably couldn't tell you how much he's spent over the past 17 years to try again, but at least he's been able to pay the bills by parlaying his reputation for note-bending grandeur into sideman gigs and remix tracks. He's recently rounded up his old bandmates for a smattering of shows, but for now, the best he has to offer is The Coral Sea, a collaboration with Patti Smith recorded before two London audiences in 2005 and 2006.

My Bloody Valentine Loveless Site/Warner Bros. 1991

Patti Smith and Kevin Shields The Coral Sea Pask 2008

When Smith came out of her own hibernation in 1996, she tested the water with The Coral Sea. It's a small book, interspersing about 30 pages of prose with 14 Robert Mapplethorpe photos, and it's her most inscrutable work. Transformed into two discs of semi-improvisational spell-casting and New Age-y washes of sound, it's a smidge more accessible. It's a cliché to call Smith a poet-priestess, but this is exactly what people mean by that. Transcendence is just one of her talents, but it's what sets her apart from every other kick-ass rock chick.

What sets Shields apart from every other pedal-pusher is his insatiable taste for texture. Loveless teems with woozy white noise and tons of tremolo. From the startling opening riff of "Only Shallow" to the dancey, dated "Soon," MBV bludgeoned listeners with Bilinda Butcher's gauzy vocals and created something delicate out of Shields' deafening guitars. But even the most memorably eardrum-scraping bits — "To Here Knows When" and "When You Sleep" — work better as peripheral listening than as focal points.

By all accounts, Shields is determined to finish MBV's third album sometime this millennium. But after such a long buildup, there's no way he can win. Because all these years later, he's obliged to top a masterpiece that exists mostly in fans' memories. MBV could have used Loveless as a blueprint for further building. Instead, it's become an untouchable relic.

(m_fine@citypaper.net)