Loveless was made up of squillions of layers of guitar (layers of not too hevaily distorted guitar at that).
The uber distortion came from the layering of takes of the same lines & the melody was held by keeping the distortion on any given track in check.
Get the sound you want from your set up, mic it, then turn the reverb off & the distortion back a notch or two from where you liked it.
Record,
record the same again & again & again.
Pan 1 & 3 L, 2 & 4 R & play back adding the reverb you require.
Donm't be fooled by what you think is THE shoegaze sound live according to your set up & what is going to gaze right back at you from the recording.
There's a thread somewhere around this forum about recording as opposed to playing distorted guitars. Do a search for it as it is very clear & detailed about how to get what you're after.
One of the tricks is to record a series of takes of the same line, pann them & then EQ each differently to gain a different aspect of what you were after - so one is low passed, another high passed, one is chunky mids, another couple emphasise the freqs carrying the melody. The main point is that it's not the same as playing live.
If you have a squiz at the song Softdance on my Soundclick page you'll hear the results of about 10 guitar tracks that followed the ideas from the thread mentioned. Probably not a good example but - before I read & followed it I had two full, tfat distorted tracks that sounded great in the room as I recorded them but all mud with some fizz from the recorder on playback. I recorded more tracks, panned & EQ'd to create the, admittedly amateur, result on that track.
Oh, the only device used was a Big Fluff (Muff clone) on some of the tracks.