Playing the second of two nights in Glasgow’s most famous music venue, My Bloody Valentine are not so much a band to silence their critics but to deafen them instead. You can usually tell that you’re not attending a normal gig when the bars and merchandise stall give out free noise reducing ear-plugs.
Indeed sets of ear-plugs are almost essential as the band are now older since they last toured way back in the nineties, they are still very, very loud.
The actual setlist comprises of many of Kevin Shields bands best songs, opening song ‘I Only Said’, ‘Only Shallow’, ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’, it’s all thunderously loud, as scuzzy as ever and such a welcome relief from the amount of bands that have been playing venues the size of the Barrowlands with absolutely nothing to offer. Yes, we’re looking at you The Ting Tings.
In fact, you could go into incredible lengths of depth about the set and come to the conclusion that as expected, My Bloody Valentine are in fact ‘bloody brilliant’.
However the one moment that stands out above anything else comes during closing song ‘You Make Me Realise’, when out of nowhere, we get a “noise interlude”. Cymbals crash, bass notes make the entire room shake, Shields guitar wails, screeches and screams like if Chewbacca got really, really drunk one night and wrecked the place. There are no discernable notes or nothing really musical about this, but it’s deafening.
Almost as if caught in the turbulence of a planes jet engine, it knocks the venue for six. People are covering their ears, a few couples scuttle to the exit, not willing to stick it out to the end. Ten minutes go past, and there’s no compromise, the band are almost punishing the crowd.
The floor still shakes, even the visuals projected behind the band become extremely difficult to watch as the images of the leaves of a bush rustling in the wind are left behind for vertical white lines moving slowly up and down the backdrop, eventually splitting until more and more white lines are slowly moving around.
Almost twenty-five minutes after the band leave the song, they almost seamlessly launch back into it, no hesitations, as if they’re all completely on the same wavelength. There’s a sense of relief amongst the crowd, almost of achievement that they’ve endured twenty-five minutes of sheer noise to be around for the last ninety or so seconds of the song and as soon as it’s finished, the band depart a stage without a word.
It’s good to have My Bloody Valentine back, even if they’re in as dark a mood as ever.
more photos the show, courtesy of James Cadden, on Flickr
//Matthew Shaw