Reunion shows might cause a gag reflex in even the most iron-stomached music fan. After all, we’re only human.
If the thought of an iconic band reassembled 20 years later in arena-friendly form to the delight of many a toe-tapping, Teva-footed amateur sends shivers down your spine, it’s because it ought to.
When it comes to My Bloody Valentine, however, the word “reunion” has never seemed to fit. The band’s heyday produced only two albums to speak of, and the only one that anyone really does speak of, the expansive and blissful Loveless, is already a teenager. Having retreated to the studio with the production of an elusive album no fan is holding their breath for, and with little more than a few musical peeps in the17 years following, the band began a selective “reunion” tour last year.
I was able to catch their show in San Francisco last fall, and can therefore attest to the only two things ever mentioned about a My Bloody Valentine show—that it is both beautiful and loud enough to set off car alarms.
Perhaps it’s no wonder that a band boasting live crescendos of up to 130 decibels (for reference, a jet engine from 100 feet away reaches 140 decibels) has remained elusive. Take an album like Loveless on tour, and you might also need a long vacation.
So they play loud—I remember my bones being physically shaken and my own voice sounding distant to me for two days following the show—but these simple chords, lifted into the ether by stacks of speakers and some 30 effects pedals, are hardly an oppressive force.
The songs burst into the atmosphere, the voices of Shields and Butcher swimming into and out of each other in a romantic harmony afloat somewhere in the wave pool of noise. It might be expected that the vocals would be drowned in a show so wildly populated with sound, but they instead take on a golden, ghostly echo. They are known to close with a 20-minute bombardment of “You Made Me Realise,” which tends to build to a crescendo that can send the change in your right front pocket a-rattle.
So call it what you will, but the reunion of My Bloody Valentine is an opportunity to finally experience what all those creepy bearded guys at the record store have been talking about all these years—the show that bands like Mogwai, Animal Collective and Deerhunter can only make vague gestures toward.
Seattle is, for now, the closest most of us will get to what will probably go down as the loudest live experience possible, and will certainly be remembered as the last word in the amplified, textural sweetness that younger bands can only emulate.