Japancakes
Loveless

The album by My Bloody Valentine, from 1991, mixed tremendous feedback, detuned guitars, compact and resistant walls of sound with simple, dreamlike, delicate, and refined melodies; electronic embroidery coming from alien planets and captivating like few other things. The result was a perfect balance—not for everyone and difficult to understand—between noise and sound; the two elements, taken separately, would lead to: if the noise were removed, a pop record, if the melody were removed, a noise record à la Merzbow. And probably, taken separately, they wouldn't convey a quarter of what the work does this way, as they blend, complement each other, one filling the gaps of the other and vice versa.

The Japancake decided to reuse these melodies, to extricate them from their context, and the result is a pleasant and fairly engaging pop record, adorned with the use of instruments that aren't in the original; but the sad truth is that these melodies, without merging with the distortions, achieve much less.

Let’s be clear: they didn’t just take the melodies, strip them of noise, and serve them to us on a plate; no, they rearranged them, readapted them, but they remain those and it is immediately noticeable. Perhaps they would have done better to offer them as they are in their original album, with a few embellishments to enhance the sound, to make it fuller.

While "Loveless" remains an immortal album of shoegaze and music as a whole, which grows with repeated listens, this collection of covers gives the impression of precipitously dropping in quality with each listen, ultimately becoming cloying. It should then be considered as a simple and successful divertissement.

Recommended if you are looking for well-made music—in general, exciting music—but if there is something exciting in this album (and there is), it's owed to the source work. Therefore, I refer you primarily to that. It is certainly not an easy work nor can it be understood with just a single listen, but it definitely offers much more satisfaction.