“When you want to get to something big, the only thing that matters is that you don’t care about the consequences” – Kevin Shields, February 1992.
By the year 1991, the UK scene was in a process of closure and sound synthesis that had started around the early 1980s with the onset of post punk and the subsequent rise of gothic rock. Unlike the noisy North American no wave scene in New York City (directed by Sonic Youth and DNA), the British scene evoked noise in a more introspective and atmospheric way, influenced by the famous “Scottish sound” of Cocteau Twins and The Jesus and Mary Chain. At the same time, there was a strong revisionism in guitar playing, in which young people were influenced by the psychedelics of the 60s with artists such as The Byrds and the particular sound of their guitarist Roger McGuinn.
My dear love he is a beloved son of that process of aesthetic, social and musical research and experimentation that British youth have gone through. The story of without love, his masterpiece, which turns 30 today, involved a before and after when it came to thinking of the guitar as an instrument and in the way of designing a rock album. The band’s second album became the image of an endless obsession with rock culture, which drags and demolishes myths in its creation process.
The idea of eternal and infinite concepts that embrace utopia in rock has its origins in stories of idealization and disappointment such as that experienced by Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson in gestation and the madness he felt during the album gestation process. Smile in 1967. But begin to understand the special meaning of without love, we must return to the origins and artistic development of Kevin Shields and his group My Bloody Valentine.
Shields was born in New York in 1963 and quickly settled with his family in Ireland, where the influence of post punk and dark wave marked his adolescence.. Just as Manchester and Sheffield were the birthplace of the new British psychedelia of the early 1980s, Dublin with Grangemouth would be the origin of the Saxon “homeland of the shoegaze”.
My Bloody Valentine was formed in Dublin in 1983, named after the 1981 Canadian film of the same name directed by George Mihalka. On their first stage, the band’s lead singer was David Conway, with whom they recorded the EP. Geek ! in 1985. Influenced by the post punk scene made up of Public Image Ltd, Bauhaus and Misfits, their sound identity will undergo a change with the departure of Conway and the arrival in 1987 of singer and guitarist Bilinda Butcher.
By the time the EPs came out Strawberry wine and Ecstasy that same year, Shields and Butcher radically altered the group’s harmonic and melodic roots. The eruption of the so-called “Second Summer of Love”, which in addition to rave culture and ecstasy promoted a strong revisionism of psychedelics of the sixties, made Shields begin to recognize the importance of harmonies. whispered, which replaced the strident voices of the first works of the group. This allowed him to design his original and avant-garde guitar sound wall that will eventually change the way the guitar is approached as the main instrument within a rock band forever.
During these years, Shields also began to work on his innovative guitar technique called “glide”., consisting of strumming chords while holding the vibrato (or “whammy”) bar of the guitar, which ends up causing the tones and intensities of the notes to fluctuate. This volatile sound is accentuated by the effects of the two key pedals (in addition to the tremolo and reverb effects) in the future composition of the sound. without love: The Mirror Image Delay and Distortion S1 which create an atmospheric sound and has his first example with the single “You Made Me Realize” released in 1988.
With the release of his first LP, is nothing In November 1988, Shields and his band added a sonic notion based on German Kraut. During the 1970s, projects such as New! they had used their guitars and drums as if they were organic samplers to define the structure of the song. But unlike its German counterparts and taking advantage of the advancement of sample technology, My Bloody Valentine began to sketch the rhythmic sequences which would be the constitutive basis of without love: that of evoke the sound of a melancholy and introspective side instead of associating it with anger and tension as was the case since the origins of garage rock with The sounds, until the advent of glam and later of punk.
without love Work began in mid-1989, with the initial plan to record it in just five days at Blackwind Studios in London. But this idea, originally proposed by the Creation label, was quickly discarded.. The recording was delayed in a slow process in which, with the exception of sound engineers Alan Moulder and Anjali Dutt, no one understood the ideas running through Kevin Shields’ psyche. Is that without love It was not an album with a conventional set of songs, but rather an image or mental projection whose sonic ideas were in constant and endless development..
Shields imagined a sound in his head that had to last forever and not be anchored all at once, and for this task the least important thing was the record label’s delays.. Thus, the drums were recorded in 1989, the basses in 1990 and the guitars in 1991. And during this period, a series of problems occurred which marked the composition and the significance of the album. Drummer Colm O’Ciosiog was going through a severe nervous breakdown and recorded only two songs on the live album (“Only shallow” and “Touch“), The rest of the drums are samples played by himself. It also happened that, two years after he started, When Shields started recording guitars, he couldn’t remember most of the songs which were the correct chords..
All this delayed the process of recording the album which will eventually go through nineteen recording studios and sixteen sound engineers. During these years, the record company sees the budget of the album increase constantly because the group refuses to give a clear answer on the completion of the album. From this tense and desperate relationship between the record company and the band, the titles of some of the songs that would be part of the album emerged that were released in various EPs and singles to partially quench the thirst for new Creation Records: “Soon”(” Soon “) on the EP Glider edited in April 1990, “Here knows when”(” Who knows when “) included in the EP Tremolo February 1991, and “When you sleep”(” While you sleep “) released as a promotional single for the album in November 1991.
With a budget that has skyrocketed to £ 250,000 (which would equate to almost half a million pounds today) and a creative vortex that swept everything around him (including Shields’ own relationship with the band ), without love this was one of the main causes that led to the bankruptcy of Creation Records and its subsequent purchase by Sony. But the light at the end of the tunnel was finally starting to appear when the vocals were recorded in June 1991 at Britannia Row and Protocol Studios.
The vocals were a determining element in the identity of the album: this kind of monaural sound that runs through the songs of Without love, similar to what one hears if one could hear only with one ear, it was enlivened by the whispers that the band had incorporated into their style back in the days of Strawberry wine. The vocal harmonies, with a tonality involving Belinda Butcher, resemble choral whispers that produce the effect of turning words into sounds., generating a kind of proper language that is part of the indivisible synthesis that is built in without love.
For its part, the different layers of guitar sound built into tremolo, delay, reverb and distortion, have been worked on primarily with the Fender Jaguar and Fender Jazzmaster through the use of the aforementioned “slippery guitar” technique to generate the feeling of a kind of infinite sound image that goes on song after song, instead of evoking the concept of a classic album with successive songs.
Another strong element emerged from the different Shields’ feedback experiment when miking opposing amps (like the Vox AC 30, the Vox AC4 and the Marshall JCM800, among others). The vibrations generated between the opposing teams produce an echo very different from that commonly heard on other albums of the genre. Taking advantage of the reverberation of opposing teams, the guitar stopped sounding like a guitar itself and took on a more abstract sound that transcended the iconic timbre that had reigned since the origins of rock and roll.
The album’s final process lived up to the entire history of chaos, romanticism, and artistic obsession that ran through it.. After engineer Dick Meany did the final mixes at Church Studios in London, it was used for the final cut. a 1970s film audio stitching machine that caused all final mixes to go out of sync. Miraculously, Shields was able to reconstruct the final mixes from memory and after a mastering process that took 13 days, without love it was finally concluded.
30 years after its publication, without love can be understood as the last great rock culture experience to date. He forever changed the way we approach the guitar, and his creative process takes on the character of an artistic utopia transformed into a musical album. At a time, represents the final step in the attempt to elevate rock to a new and unfamiliar universe, something that even many guitar groups today did not dare or could overcome. It is also a clear example of how the organic can coexist with technology in a relationship guided by the human pulse, an idea that becomes relevant in a musical present where the digital has taken precedence over the artisanal. without love it still remains in force and invites us to the challenge of rethinking rock culture as a tool for the radical transformation of the imagination and social perception.
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