Live review: My Bloody Valentine

My Bloody Valentine
February 19, 2013
Enmore Theatre, Sydney

“Are you going to the concert as well? Everytime I see a young couple or group coming in, looking lost, I just say, ‘earplugs are there.’”

The Day/Night Chemist on Enmore Rd is more commonly known as a methadone clinic, among other things, but tonight it has become the largest earplug distribution hub in the known universe – or at least the Inner West. The ‘concert’ is Ireland shoegaze legends My Bloody Valentine’s first Sydney show in over twenty years, and precautions are necessary. There’s a scene in This Is Spinal Tap in which they are pejoratively billed as ‘England’s Loudest Band’ – as if this is their only selling point. A Drum Media article some time was severely hung up on this same ‘selling point’ for excellent Sydney band The Laurels, with the idea that sound equals substance. For My Bloody Valentine, however, it is not a selling point, it is a self-evident truth. Volume is key to the My Bloody Valentine experience, which is as much a sensory rush as a musical one. Rock bands want their guitars to be loud; My Bloody Valentine need them to be. Which is why, for the first half of the set, people were actually complaining that The World’s Loudest Band weren’t loud enough. Ten minutes into the holocaust section that tears apart set closer You Made Me Realise, these same people were possibly rethinking their stance on volume, but for the first half at least, the noise wasn’t deafening, which is tantamount to failure for some extremist MBV fans.

They played all the right songs, though. There’s always a danger that any band touring their new album, even one as effortlessly excellent as mbv, will fill their set with ‘here’s another new one’, missing the point of their own appeal. My Bloody Valentine only played New Youfrom their new record, focusing instead on key moments from their two prior (classic) studio albums, and the EPs that orbited them.

I Only Said and When You Sleep opened proceedings, the two pop centerpieces of Loveless and the songs that rely the least on sheer volume to attack. The EP tracks, easily the most underrated and thrilling material in the band’s canon, but usually overshadowed by the sheer weight of Loveless, punctuated the set nicely and provided a sense of dynamics and a point of difference that may have been missing had the band leant on Loveless more. The set list was perfectly paced, with ‘hits’ like Only Shallow (the one that sounds like dinosaurs fighting) and Soon (the Madchester-y one that Eno rightly called “the vaguest music ever to have been a hit”) pressing against EP and Isn’t Anything tracks.

But the aforementioned ‘holocaust section’ during closer You Made Me Realise was the real performance piece of the set, with a cacophonic din pushing everything (and everyone) to the limit for fifteen minutes of pure sound. It was disorientating, excessive, punishing and when it lifted, it was blissful and restorative. Nirvana were praised in 1991 for their soft/loud dynamic, but Shields and co. were the real sonic explorers during that banner year. It’s good to see that 22 years later, they are as uncompromising as ever.

Oh, and all the chemist clientele needn’t have bothered – there were security guards handing out earplugs are every entrance. But it was like a band-aid on a bullet-wound. For many, Sydney will sound soft as snow for the next few days.