Ear Plugs Recommended

Last Tuesday night was an experience and a half for me. For a couple of years now, I've been shoving a band in people's facing, claiming that one of their albums is one of the greatest of all time. This band is none other than Irish shoe-gaze powerhouse My Bloody Valentine. They had broken up in the 90's due to a slowly decaying relationship between the two primary songwriters/vocalists/guitarists, Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher. The name of the album I tend to shove down my ever so accepting friends is Loveless. The album is filled with the most unbelievable arrangements of sound, melody, and most importantly, distortion. The level of distortion on the guitars in at its peak, I had never hear anything like it.

Announced earlier this year, My Bloody Valentine announced their reunion and plans of a tour. The band has not toured in over 10 years due to Kevin Shields' unstable sanity and tendency to disappear and fall into obscurity. I had gotten my chance to see the effervescent band that had changed the way I listened to music. The band has gotten such critical acclaim that dissertations and essays have been written about Loveless. The album itself is an excellent representation of the relationship between Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher, their fleeting love for one another as the album was recorded.

Seeing the band live is a whole other experience. I had been reading up on their legendary shows that consist of walls of amplifiers, drowning distortion and ear plugs. That's right, ear plugs. There shows have been known for being the loudest in the world, there were EMTs present at
the show, as well as earplugs being handed out at the door for the protection of every one's ears.

Through most of the show I had kept my earplugs in. Being in the front for this show seems like a poor decision, but having the monitors pointed at you with the about 7 guitar stacks was amazing. It creates this wall of sound and distortion that is unlike anything I have ever experienced. There is one song in particular that is absolutely amazing. There is a song called "The Holocaust" that consists of a 20 minute wall of distortion. The sound is deafening, and the actual distortion had all of Roseland shaking. I was able to equate this to war, the sensation of war. I felt this overwhelming sense of beauty and chaos. You're trying to access this lost sense of majesty between the reality of what you're experiencing and the sensationalism of what you expect it to be. The violent images in Shooting War have this sense of beauty and chaotic beauty.

Edit: This was an older post that I hadn't published.