Once upon a time, there was a band called My Bloody Valentine. They made very pretty music, performed it very loudly for their fans and then disappeared for sixteen years. Now they’re back to delight us all again. But the world has moved on; young pretenders have come (many have gone again).
Will these old-stagers be able to keep up? Can they still cut it with the kids? Does the world still need or want them?
Yes.
Fuck, yes.
Tonight’s gig tells us two things, predominantly. Firstly, it reminds us that My Bloody Valentine always existed in their own world, their own unique space. This might be a very different world than that which greeted 1991’s Rollercoaster tour, but it doesn’t make the first bit of difference. When you stand in front of My Bloody Valentine and they hammer and smash into you with their howling, unearthly repetitive take on rock music, you are in their world, not your own.
Secondly, there’s a very good reason that MBV became this (and their own) planet’s foremost shoegaze band. Because they are really good at it. Really, really good. Awesomely good. Because they have always understood the genus better than any other band. They know how to combine the sonic cudgel with the melodically-beguiling. How to steamroller with distortion, delight with harmony and mesmerise with rhythm – all at the same time.
And, of course, MBV do loud. Just amazingly loud. It’s a sustained and brutal sonic assault. The effect in the crowd is to be completely enveloped by sound – it takes on a perceptible physical presence around you, you exist within it and as part of it. It’s claustrophobic and frightening and astonishing. It induces waves of nausea, it does things to the internal organs you know instinctively aren’t good and sometimes it just fucking hurts but, by God, you wouldn’t be anywhere else. There’s much talk of earplugs before MBV take the stage (packs are given away free by the organisers) and, during the apocalyptic 30 minute white-noise demolition of ‘You Made Me Realise’, it’s clear why. As you wear them and MBV bludgeon you from afar, you come to realise that, outside of that 3cm-long piece of silicon wedged in your ear, there exists a seriously hostile environment, a place utterly inhospitable to the human ear. It’s the aural equivalent of running on the surface of Mars in a perilously flimsy spacesuit. Carrying scissors. It is utterly exhilarating.
There’s no new material and no surprises. They play a collection of their absolute best culled from the last two albums and a handful of EPs. They are onstage for an hour-and-a-half and, aside from a mumbled Shields comment following one song’s false start, there’s no chit-chat to puncture the unbridled onslaught. They are completely unforgiving to an audience that quickly comes to realise there will be no quarter.
As we file out a collection of bedraggled, uplifted, brutalised, changed punters, I finally realise what Kevin Shields has known all along: throughout their career, one can imagine MBV being told that they are too loud – by nervous promoters, safety-obsessed local councils or near-sighted soundmen, maybe. However, what becomes clear over this perception-altering ninety minutes is that MBV are not too loud. They are just right. In reality, it’s every single other band on the planet that is NOT LOUD ENOUGH, which is just one reason why My Bloody Valentine have returned, nearly two decades after their pomp, and proved themselves to be the most essential live act imaginable. Go. Get a ticket and go. Change your life. Change your aural perception of the world. Know what it means to be utterly taken over by the beautiful, frightening, otherworldly, unparalleled majesty and power of My Bloody Valentine.
Posted by Neil McOnie.
