I was expecting to hear God in the music. I may have heard God, but it wasn’t in the music.

Trying to make easy sense of a My Bloody Valentine show is not useful. The band come with so much baggage from Loveless, their subsequent multiple implosions and hermecy that I feel the same way about reviewing an MBV show as what Chuck Klosterman felt about reviewing Chinese Democracy – it’s like reviewing a unicorn; you spend most of your time just checking that it really exists at all.

The Unicorn

However, I can now confirm that MBV really does exist as a band and that they really do play guitars and other instruments and that they even play music. And here’s the kicker, it’s pop music; unbefuckinglievably loud pop music. It seems that MBV is hell bent on in their live shows producing the sound that Kevin Shields hears in his head[1] and don’t care what they have to do to your eardrums to do it. You know you’re in trouble when there’s a guy out front of the venue selling earplugs. Inside people were passing around earplugs like chewing gum, person to person in acts of kindness to strangers and friends alike.

The Blast

Empirically their live music is extremely loud renditions of old songs with a heavy leaning towards Loveless in which 99% of the vocals are lost and only the most powerful of pop hooks survive. But the music is not experimental or fundamentally noise-orientated, it’s simple pop but played at a level where the songs disintegrate.
So how loud was it? Really loud – really. The first few songs weren’t really explosively loud but I’m sure that the sound engineer[2] kept slowly cranking it up throughout the set until, by the set closing performance of You Made Me Realise (aka Wall of Noise Explosion), it was brain splitting. I’m very serious when I say that my pants, teeth and neck hairs were all vibrating throughout the last 10 or so minutes – the speaker stack eventually produced a cool breeze that wafted through the venue. But to what end do they make this humongous noise?
Depending on your view of them MBV are either geniuses pushing the boundaries of what is sonically possible using nothing more than 12 guitar amplifiers, 20 or so effects pedals, tremelo arms, two microphones and a nuclear-powered speaker stack; or they are hypocritical, vitriol-filled snobs reluctantly riding the overhyped glory of a single album released 18 years ago. There’s probably truth in both views but I do feel that, regardless of whether they are part-assholes or not, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt in one area; that they are serious about wanting to create a very particular sound both in studio and on stage and are sincere about the attempt that they make at producing that sound. I don’t think that it is a simple matter of saying that Shields is a genius or a faded loser, or that the songs justify the endless noise. There is an unavoidable dichotomy in trying to please fans/listeners who want you to reproduce the ecstatic experiences that Loveless produced in many. I somehow feel that Shields and Co are up against not only trying to create the sounds in their own heads but also the sounds in all of the fans’ heads. They make a quixotic attempt at producing a sound that will fill your body, your head and Kevin Shields’ reaching. The result is this huge noise. I don’t want to overextend my praise for their sound, but it’s analogous to the first time I saw a Jackson Pollock painting in person[3] – you may love it, you may hate it or it may not do much for you. But you immediately know that it is beyond the ordinary.

Much has been made of their heroic/doomed performances at Coachella and in the three or so other shows around the US and in the end the crowd left the building and the band boarded their bus. Why did they include Austin as one of only five shows that they played? Was the venue sold out? What was the point of the beyond-weird opening acts? Who knows – but I’m glad I went.
I guess that the show is best summed up by a snippet of humanity when, in a moment of relative silence between two of the songs, a lone fan on the balcony shouted ‘Thank you so much!’ and the audience spontaneously erupted in applause. Regardless of why you go to an MBV show – you get something back from it, it may not be what you expected or had come for, but you’re sure to remember it.

Here’s a little video montage of the pop, the noise and the bicycle ride home. In most cases the distortion of recording live music on a cellphone is annoying at best, but in this case it’s somehow the only way to do justice to the reality of MBV’s sound. And listen to the difference between the distortion in the first two songs (in which some parts of the melody are discernible) and the outright sonic crush of the final minutes.