There is a crucial moment in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation in which Scarlett Johansson's character, Charlotte, gazes longingly out of her taxi window at the undying neon lights of Tokyo. Her night's companion, Bill Murray's Bob Harris, is slouched over in the seat next to her, karaoke and sake clearly having gotten the best of him. A night on the town provided temporary comfort for the equally nomadic characters, but on the drive home, Charlotte's wide-eyed yearning is for something intangible – a kind word, a warm embrace, a friend. As she studies the world around her, bright lights cutting through the endless black of night, My Bloody Valentine's 'Sometimes' roars delicately in the background. The use of the song, from the band’s seminal album Loveless, is painstakingly perfect in its parallels to the film. The rush of impalpable emotions garnered by both the music and the movie intertwine, collide and collapse again in a swirl of uncertainty and contradiction, leaving its artistic subject both affected and reeling. 

Such is the effect of My Blood Valentine. On the 1991 album Loveless, the band took a tradition of noise; a precedent set by the likes of the Velvet Underground and the Jesus and Mary Chain, and turned it on its collective head, rewriting the pop-music handbook in the process. The album is one of contradictions, both internally, in a musical sense, and externally in the descriptions it amasses and feelings it elicits. At once beautiful and startling, Loveless' sheer volume has proven to be polarizing, and often serves as a key component to the music being made.

In a similarly contradictory vein, the decade and a half since its release has revealed the album as both formative and under-appreciated, universally praised in certain rock circles but too often overlooked beyond the music press. This is largely the result of the band’s trademark—a crushing wall of guitars. Both a gift and a curse, thick dreamy guitars push through speakers until they crackle and nearly everything has been cranked up to eleven, hitting listeners with equal force in the gut and the eardrums. This brute force would go on to influence every band whose audience dare gaze at their shoes, even propelling the Smashing Pumpkins into the mainstream, hand-in-hand with Corgan’s familiar breathy vocal delivery. Distortion, tremolo and digital reverb give the songs an other-worldly quality; the wall of sound and simplistic yet discreet lyrics combine to baffle your best judgment and basic understanding of how music used to sound in a world pre-Loveless. This has often proven difficult to stomach for casual fans who cower in the shadows of monstrous noise, blind to the underlying pop-music mastery.  

Dwarfed by this deafening fuzz, drums and bass (courtesy of Colm O'Ciosig and Debbi Googe, respectively) push hand-in-hand against an assuming weight, fighting playfully to be heard, and creating a tense struggle that results in alluring harmony. In the spirit of contradiction, sampled and live drums combine to anchor the album's percussion, a result of O'Ciosig's illness during recording – requiring the use of triggered and sequenced drums.

The final piece of the cryptic puzzle is the breathy, eerie vocals of band mastermind Kevin Shields. The band has asserted that vocals are merely another instrument of equal import, and for this, they are traditionally low in the mix, adding an element of mystery to their overall tone. Instead of the center-stage generally reserved for vocal melody and lyricism, the band – far more concerned with a unified, bigger picture than selling records – allow this to fight for its rightful place among the unyielding entirety. 

This mystery is evoked by Shields on ‘Come In Alone’; his delicate vocal line testing the listener’s patience. Infinite listens may not bestow the full lyrical catalog, but it will reveal, in clips and phrases, a blunt simplicity as Shields muses on love, sex and sleep. 'Come In Alone' has a candid, unadorned quality and when Shields sings, "Why I don't need/To believe/What you see/To look up/And around/You were gone," it suggest a sorrow that cuts straight to the core.  

Having approached maniacal, creative genius status in the school of Brian Wilson, Shields is rumored to have gone through 14 recording engineers through the recording of Loveless, nearly bankrupting the band's label in the process. Fortunately, the dictatorial perfectionism paid off in spades. In a song-to-song summation, the album carries a comparable weight to its cohesive whole.  

Album opener, 'Only Shallow' is a guitar-driven scorcher that wouldn't sound out of place on the next edition of Guitar Hero, fitting perfectly in the Thrash and Burn section. 'While You Sleep' is a hit in the guise of a volcano, hot and dirty and simmering with distortion, erupting in a powerful fuzz-outro.  'I Only Said' fleshes out the album's flawless middle section, excelling where too many albums buckle under the pressure and wane in quality. The song's main riff is instantly recognizable, a high pitched melodic line that rises above the fuzz with an ear-catching directness as its measured repetition provides foundation. The album's hot streak continues with the abovementioned 'Come In Alone', a rare vocal-based piece of Loveless' complex enigma. In all, Loveless is pioneering in its ambition, rearranging traditional song-writing priorities by placing ambiance above accessibility.  

The album’s towering pinnacle, and by this writer's estimations, the most beautiful song of the 1990s, follows as 'Sometimes' invades your psyche. A drum-less, acoustic ballad passed through the MBV filter of noise, the song's soft acoustic strums rest beneath the chaos, rising to the top like a layer of foam. Underneath, like Charlotte's wide-eyed innocence in a foreign land, the song displays a vulnerability that cannot be masked by any amounts of reverb, layering or static. It is at once brutally raw and sonically flawless; even the futuristic textures pass as organic reinforcing Shields at his most tender.

The idea that an album of such dense and intricate production can manage to sound organic speaks to the true musical empathy understood by Shields and co. – the exact basis for its inclusion in Sofia Coppola’s oeuvre. The search for solace within Lost In Translation mirrors the conflict found throughout Loveless. How can anyone be consoled amidst a crude, futuristic and cold reality? As the chords of ‘Sometimes’ come crashing down, a warm familiarity overwhelms. Shields may not provide answers, but his static is the soundtrack to understanding. 

'Sometimes' would have surely served as the album's final notes had the band not had one final trick up their collective sleeves in the form of the seven-minute 'Soon', a triggered-drum led pop opus, masked in spacey psychedelia. These final notes are the sound of My Blood Valentine closing the door on this brand of lushly arranged, pop-shoegaze hybrid. Oft imitated and never duplicated, Loveless will spin you around to the point of disorientation and surrounding your entire consciousness. It is a true sonic milestone, cementing its own spot in musical history on the strength of its infinite growl.