My Bloody Valentine @ Roseland Ballroom 9/23/08
Having been too young and not aware of Loveless when it first came out I never had the chance to see MBV live before last night. Although I read a lot of articles about how loud their show was and how much it turned off some off the audience because of the complete disregard for people’s eardrums, it’s hard to fully realize what this means until you have actually heard the enormous sound this band makes, and anything I say in this post would be an understatement but I will try my best to describe it.
One of the beauties of Loveless is that it can be both a passive and active listening experience. You can just as easily put this on a low volume while doing work or sleeping and let it fade into the background as you can blast it on your speakers at home, it changes with what you do. It may be one of the most malleable albums out there. Every time you listen you can hear a different clash of feedback intermingling and throwing a cloud over the actual song structure. The album live, however, is ten times this…and there is no way a recording could take in all the layers and intricacies that you hear when you listen to this live.
MBV came on a little late with some very light happy music playing as they got ready, possibly purposefully to show the complete opposite end of the spectrum for the upcoming hour and a half. MBV live is just like the albums, beautiful and offsetting for the far distance it places you from the traditional music and the very close distance it puts you to the noise in between.
When Kevin Shields or Blinda Butcher stepped up to the mic to sing you could only hear a faint difference in the music (even less so than on their albums), and there were many times when they were not singing at all and you thought that someone was. The layers and layers of noise create vocals and other instruments as they all combine and intermingle. The songs are so dense that you can almost see the sound waves hitting each other. The set really hit me on “Come in Alone” when the chorus came in to a barrage of yellow strobe lights that was as intense as anything I’ve ever heard live. This is a live show that actually affects your body physically. The wash of chords, pummeling bass from Googe, and frantic drums (Ciosig) are something you can feel in your bones the entire set, which made the experience anything but a passive one. The constant flicker of strobe lights made the stage hard to see, forcing you to just close your eyes and become entrenched in the sound (or, in this case, stare at your shoes).
I won’t go into every song on the set, but highlights included “Soon”, “To Here Knows When” and “I Only Said”. But the real earmark of the set was the last, “You Made Me Realise”. For the entire set, besides the last song, it was everything I expected the show to be. But up until the last song I was still wondering what all the fuss was about (sure they were loud, but what’s with all the reports of people walking out on their shows). Then the last song came, otherwise known as armageddon. They played 3 minutes into “…Realise” and then began the driving chords and drum beat that usually mark the end of a song. I waited there, as they played this, for a couple minutes for the feedback to just stop and for them to put away their guitars. Little did I know that 20 some minutes later MBV would still be crunching the same driving chords only now built up 100 times, speakers crackling and all. I had the earplugs, but it didn’t matter because the loudness still makes the bones in your skull rattle.
15 minutes in and I felt like I was tripping and was possibly going to go insane. There were many that couldn’t handle it and started walking out. The stage backdrop of parallel lines moving and multiplying on screen began to turn offering a reflection of the music as it turned from just a closing cavalcade of guitars in a full on opening of the heavens (i know, a little dramatic sounding, but it was pretty mind blowing). As you felt the ground shake and you looked around at people holding their ears, you felt like you were in some surreal ground zero. As the barage came to an end, MBV left the stage, but left the bass going, creating a rumble that, if any lower, might shatter bones. I was holding my head and cringing as my brain rattled in my skull, it was a release when it finally ended a minute later.
I am wondering if the tickets were 50-some dollars because every show they play they have to pay for new speakers for the venue. I don’t even know how you create something that loud and still make it audible or be able to call it music, must be a sound engineer’s nightmare. But it was beautiful, an experience that is unique to the band and something that will stick in my head for a long time.
“Did I just hear a Holocaust?” I heard one person say upon leaving the doors of Roseland Ballroom as I was texting a friend saying it sounded like a machine gun being fired into your ears for most of the show.
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Tags: Uncategorized , live review , music , my bloody valentine
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