Plasma Pool

Before seeing My Bloody Valentine live, I had no real conception of any of the band members – or really just Kevin Shields, because he’s the only person anyone talks about when they talk about the group – as people. Sure, Kevin Shields’ emotional struggles are well documented, but Brian Wilson-type issues function more as points in a narrative than as markers of knowable personality. To put it another way, if I met Shields on the street, I wouldn’t really want to strike up a conversation with him. His persona is that he makes incredible and unique music, which isn’t really a persona at all.

I’ve felt that way before, and the live experience usually does something to change my mind. When you see someone banter with the crowd and run around the stage, you can’t help but get some sense of how they interact with friends, or really anything other than a mixing board.

Not so with My Bloody Valentine. In part, that’s because the band doesn’t move much on stage, but it’s more because the music is so intense that it’s hard to get a sense of the people performing when you’re wondering how four people can make so much damn noise.

That might come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever listened to MBV’s album Loveless at a relatively low volume. Unless you turn the volume knob pretty loud, the album is an impossibly lush and inviting, especially on headphones. It’s quite difficult to compare the sound to anything, to the point where most writers just use the shorthand of saying that they employed eighteen engineers and that no one’s really sure how many guitar tracks are piled on top of each other. The great accomplishments of Loveless are a) that this morass of guitars is impossibly beautiful and b) that the album can either be imposing or gorgeous depending on what you’re paying attention to at any particular moment. Individual clumps of distortion are turned into sounds to be burrowed into endlessly.

Accordingly, the most amazing thing about MBV’s live show is that they’re able to approximate that studio complexity live, yet in an entirely different way. To give just one example, this show was easily the loudest one I’ve ever been to, and there are simply no other contenders. I listened to one song (set opener “I Only Said”) without earplugs, and by the end of it I desperately needed some kind of relief. But the level of noise is simultaneously inviting and imposing – you know you shouldn’t be listening to something quite that loud, yet it envelops more often than it assaults.

Through all of this, there are still only four people on stage. Everything instrument is played incredibly loud, but there seems to be more noise than four people could possibly make. It’s hard to figure out exactly who’s playing which guitar part, if you can even call anything they play a guitar part. On top of that, the sound changes drastically when even small things change in your listening experience, from the position of your earplugs to the tilt of your head.

And this happens on every song! “Soon” is both a dance number and a drone-a-thon. “Only Shallow” is a song of triumph and a dirge. “When You Sleep” is about pure love and awful loss (even though you can’t hear any of the words). These descriptions are obviously clichéd, but My Bloody Valentine makes the sort of music that can only be described by clichés.

There is no encore. The band instead ends things on “You Made Me Realise,” which, while a pretty short song on record, contains a 20-minute bit of noise live that’s affectionately known as “The Holocaust Section.” It is the loudest shit in the world, and it’s not anything more than out-of-tune guitars being strummed in the same way for a very long period of time.

It somehow works. At first, you try to wait the thing out, but after a few minutes it becomes reasonably hypnotizing, and you let it wash over you for a few more minutes. Then it becomes annoying again, but there are always pockets of inspiration, where the noise turns into an agent of purification. At its best, “The Holocaust Section” is the closest thing to being in utero that I can imagine, except I’m sure the womb isn’t anything close to this loud.

Finally, MBV comes back into “You Made Me Realise,” and it’s nothing less than a spiritual experience. The powerful guitars give things a sense of purpose, and suddenly the music is a song again. Of course, the ending to the show is really no less confusing than everything else in the set; in retrospect, it’s primarily the preceding context of “The Holocaust Section” that makes this return to melody something of a reprieve.

This show will always be difficult to pin down, and for the most part I think that’s alright. It was without question one of the best shows I’ve ever been to, and that’s because, while I prefer certain songs of theirs to others, My Bloody Valentine’s music is never anything less than incredibly interesting. No matter what they play, there’s always something to think about; this is music that practically begs you to think about it.

However, despite the intellectual force of their sound, listening to MBV live is an extremely visceral experience. It’s tempting to say that they vacillate between extremes unlike anyone else, but the more accurate take is that they’re able to perform in a way that somehow contains all these extremes simultaneously. For as much as they invite analysis, My Bloody Valentine remain difficult to explain. If I have little sense of them as people, that is only because their music operates in a way that regular people like me just can’t comprehend.