madmanmunt wrote:Mandroid2.0 wrote:Can someone please explain to my why this band ever mattered?
They played noisy feedback at ear splitting volume for hours on end at a bunch of shocked indie kids who at that time would otherwise be arguing about Morrissey's sexual proclivities. At least that's how I remember it being reported.
Nice. Come to think of it, that's how I kind of remember it to. In addition to being into punk and punkish music, I also had a wussy-ass college rock habit. In 1991 I was still probably listening to The Cure, The Church, and the Stone Roses.
When Loveless came out in 1991, I was 16. It may sound funny, but it somehow took the sound of what would be guitar pop and transformed what would normally be a lot of strummed guitar chords with attack and decay into one big, continuous sound. Now, this is not a big deal for a synth to do, but at the time, synth, even analog synth, kinda equaled Depeche Mode.
We know know that it was all wet reverse reverb and heavy vibrato bar manipulation over open tunings to get the sound. It nothing that sounds complex after the original time, but for impressionable 16-21 year olds who might not have had much in the grunge world to hold onto, it was one of the most sonically interesting, current things out there.
Of course, in a matter of months, you started seeing people borrowing heavily, or re-contextualizing. Smashing Pumpkins and Garbage come to mind, in addition to a shit ton of smaller bands like Colfax Abbey, Bethany Curve, Astrobrite, and such. By 1995, the sound had become passe, and that MBV guitar sound plus Garbage electro rhythm section plus female voice or reverb sad dude vocals DID become the big template for coming of age drama soundtrack and edgy commercials and such.
I'm not saying that someone had to be there when it was released to appreciate it, but it certainly helps. I don't get the Replacements, but people my age love them. However, people about 5 years older than me, who were circa 16-18 when they hit big, are just absolutely apeshit about them. Or, Link Wray's Rumble, a song which sounds totally quaint today, yet it was feared to start street brawls and promote bad behavior in the late 1950s. At the time when I was looking for a new kind of guitar or rock music and was tired of punk and hated the machismo of metal, MBV came along and hit me the right way. I'm kind of surprised they did get as big as they did.
Ben