Word came from the Catskills, where the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival was held last week: My Bloody Valentine were indeed back with a vengeance. At a festival that included some of the most important musical innovators of recent decades (ie. Shellac, Thurston Moore, Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr.) their set was widely recognized as one of the best.
“Next week in Toronto!” was the word on the street, and all the kids around town made damn sure a spot was assured them at the Kool Haus for the melodic drone jet-engine of My Bloody Valentine. For many, this would be the first opportunity to hear MBV live, as it would be the band’s first show in Toronto since the mid-90s.
Anyone who purchased earplugs before the show soon encountered a handful of Kool Haus staff handing them out in droves, either as an act of mercy or as a legal safety net. If anyone missed this conscientious crowd of earplug dispensers, bouncers and roadies were a good bet for extras. Today’s music rags often employ phrases like, “Breaking the soul of sonic frequency,” but the brilliance of My Bloody Valentine’s assault on convention and exploration of sound concept can only truly be conveyed in a live setting.
Opening for MBV were Gemma Hayes, who charmed the crowd with warm acoustic emotions backed by one educated experiment with an electric guitar, and Flowers of Hell, who pulsated kraut-rock lines into Sigur Ros/Mogwai epics and even jammed with Owen Pallett of Final Fantasy fame.
It is claimed, unofficially, that MBV hold the record of loudest band on the planet, but given their use of warm, lush mixes and soothing dream-vocals in their recordings, it can be easy for a loving listener to forget. When the first blares of “I Only Said” and “When You Sleep,” the Loveless tracks featured on countless romantic late-90s mix CDs, came rushing through Kevin Shields’ wall of Marshall stacks, some foolish onlookers stood with naked ears.
The four-piece embraced the crowd in blankets of tracks off their two classic albums, Loveless and Isn’t Anything, and as the music drifted through the band’s ambient spectrum, an increasing number of brave concertgoers began to remove their earplugs to fully experience the beautiful tones. At medium stereo volumes, MBV can be the soundtrack to a listener’s dreams, but in live format they reach for a unique and difficult dynamic: starting the performance loud and building it to something near sub-sonic, a sound that could be mistaken for heavy machinery making out with angels.
The noise opus kicked in about two minutes into “You Make Me Realise,” and developed into a low drone and a rhythm that was more felt than heard. If you weren’t wearing your earplugs at this point, you were not going to be able to hear anything for quite a while. Many didn’t care.
Sound is physical. Vibrations release chemicals. Music is feeling. Through vibrations, My Bloody Valentine was altering minds. The slightest tweaks could be felt vibrating through your toes and into your brain. Low-drones that slowly panned from one side of the room to the other felt like they were jumping hemispheres. The plateau felt like the grand finale of a major fireworks show, with the sound dropped several octaves. The crowd was very still.
A big deal has been made about Toronto’s complacent crowd, standing with arms folded, with glazed-over eyes staring forward. In this context, it almost made sense. These kids were here for a proper shoegaze. And if imitation is the greatest form of flattery, the bouncers must have been My Bloody Valentine fans too, because they surveyed the crowd standing perfectly still.
Something about the band’s stillness adds to the serenity and the mystery of the music, and the lights made the experience even more psychedelic and impossible to escape, even with closed eyes. It was as if some sort of binary hypnosis was chopped into the mix, designed to invoke a feeling of tripped-out bliss. When I finally turned around about halfway into the climax, I felt the pull of the solid and staring masses. A few kids were holding each other, moved to tears, and many more stood silently in sheer awe.
