Less Rock, More Talk

Books discussed:

Sound Bites: Eating on Tour With Franz Ferdinand
By Alex Kapranos

33 1/3: Loveless
By Mike McGonigal

If you're wondering, the photo pictures Dokken Superette in Minneapolis. It rhymes with "rockin'."

Sound Bites is adapted from a series of short essays Kapranos wrote for the U.K. newspaper the Guardian while making the world safe for sexually ambiguous neo-post-punk dance rock. He reviews restaurants, but usually the restaurant is just an excuse to write about his childhood memories of food, or about something else altogether. The writing is pretty loose, somewhat in the manner of tour blog posts, but it's good. Kapranos spent a lot of years working in restaurants and he has that kind of knowledge of the down side of dining out that you won't find in a lot of food writing.

Loveless is a new entry in a series of short books about great albums, this one, of course, covering My Bloody Valentine's 1991 masterpiece. This album is one of my all-time favorites, and I'll read just about anything about it I can find. But until recently, that hasn't been very much. The album has been shrouded in myth like few albums are these days. For example, it was said that MBV took so long in the studio that it nearly bankrupted its record company, Creation -- a charge that MBV leader Kevin Shields now flatly rejects. There is a frustratingly brief aside in McGonigal's book which suggests that this book was pulled from the presses after Shields objected to McGonigal repeating the Creation bankruptcy story.

But it's not just the inside baseball stuff that's so mysterious. It's the music itself. Even today, after years of shoe-gazer bands inspired by MBV, almost nothing else sounds like Loveless. And for years, people have been unable to explain how MBV got the album to sound like it does. Everyone had a different theory.

In recent years, Shields has been a somewhat more public figure, and he's been more open about things. In Tape Op a few years ago, he went into detail. Surprisingly, he said that there were fewer tracks of guitar on Loveless that there are on most people's demos, and that there were perhaps as many as 24 tracks of vocals. (This on an album in which the vocals are far back in the mix and most of the time and you can rarely make out individual words.) Most of the album was recorded in mono, he said, and there are relatively few effects and minimal EQ tweaks. Much of the weirdness on the album is apparently the result of MBV's heavy use of sampling. Rather than sampling old records or air raid sirens or something, Shields would sample his own guitar feedback or his bandmates' vocals and then play those sounds like an instrument.

In McGonigal's book, he goes into more detail about the recording process. It seems that Shields played just about every instrument on the album. Drummer Colm O'Coisig was sick through much of the recording (although he did single-handedly contribute the instrumental"Touched") and so Shields sampled O'Coisig's playing and then performed the new parts himself on the sampler. Shields also played the bass parts for Debbie Googe. Co-guitarist Bilinda Butcher was consigned to vocal duties.

McGonigal also delves into some of the personal stories behind the album. For instance, O'Ciosig was homeless at the time of the recording. Shields and Butcher were squatting. They were romantically involved at the time, but unhappily so. The album title may in fact refer to their relationship. Oh, and Googe is gay.

I wouldn't say this is the book that Loveless deserves. If you read a book in which Wikipedia or Allmusic.com are quoted as sources, you know the author is not working as hard as he should. But I enjoyed it. I expect other fans will do the same.