MY BLOODY VALENTINE - SANTA MONICA CIVIC CENTER, SANTA MONICA, CA - OCTOBER 1, 2008
OK, let me start off this review by saying all the prerequisite things: My Bloody Valentine was great, it was a pleasure to see this band resurrect and lay its angelic goodness on us, they played "Only Shallow" and "Soon" and a slew of tracks off their albums Loveless (1991) and Isn't Anything (1988), blah, blah, blah. Now for brass tacks: Let's talk about the feedback situation with this band, OK?
Yesterday I watched Alex Gibney's excellent documentary film "Taxi to the Dark Side" (2007), which is, in part, about America's use of torture in interrogation in places like Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Air Base, and I was joking with my fiance (who witnessed the MBV phenomenon with me) that the tactics listed in the CIA's secret interrogation program failed to include repeated playback of My Bloody Valentine live feedback.
Don't get me wrong...This translates to all kinds of awesome with me. This show was seriously one of the top five best shows I have ever seen. But no one warned me about just exactly how loud this show was going to be, and I'm talking to you, Guinness Book of World Records. I knew I was kind of in for it when I saw the teeming boxes of free earplugs upon entry to the civic center, but the reality of the end of the show being close to 15 minutes of the most industrial drone I have ever heard was more than I had bargained for. Here is a sampling of notes I took while I looked around at people clutching their ears in exquisite pain as they held their heads between their legs:
"Feels like airplanes taking off a runway and copulating in the sky"
"It makes you want to expel everything you have ever eaten"
"the angels are brandishing machine guns now"
"it's like the music in Kafka's nightmares"
"Sound rape"
The French film director Gaspar Noe has used the low-frequency rumbling sound in his movie "Irréversible" (2002) that riot police use to disperse unruly crowds. My Bloody Valentine truly approximated this very same experience. Together with the brutally assaulting light show (epileptics beware), it was the most hardcore thing I have ever witnessed, and I thank them.
My little LG Chocolate phone takes very crap video (the picture is decent, but the sound is unusable), so I will spare you. Instead, here is a very good example of what I am fumbling to say from a June 2008 My Bloody Valentine show in London:
My Bloody Valentine - You Made Me Realize (Live, June 20, 2008)
See what I mean? Please enjoy a video for "Soon," a song they performed in order to seduce us for the slaughter:
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