My Bloody Valentine – Roseland, NYC - 9/22/08

“Earplugs?” seem to be the recurrent idea connected with My Bloody Valentine’s return to the U.S. in close to two decades. The band came full circle last night, at the first of two All Tomorrow’s Parties shows at Roseland in NYC, extending a 40 second noise interlude from the extremely rare 1988 title track EP, You Made Me Realise into a 15 minute sea of aural complexity; a complexity that has driven some people from show venues in an early nineties past.

(In 1992 at St. Andrews Hall in Detroit, this infamous distortion interval extended at 20 minutes drove people to frustration, thrusting middle fingers in the air at them before walking out.) Last night, looking on from the mezzanine level, no one moved. As many came armed with earplugs or took advantage of Roseland’s complimentary offering, a mesmerized crowd merely looked on, occasionally twitching, from this all-enveloping challenge of endurance.

A multimedia experience, their video projector behaved like a conductor of their performance, emitting precisely edited streams of light images in rapid time with their guitar strumming. Deb Googe, classically bounced her bass guitar in profile between guitarists Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher, who remain the statuesque gatekeepers of shoegaze. Signature vocals, androgynous and buried, warded off and seduced the crowd simultaneously, while on-screen psychedelia and nature footage traveled hurriedly down paths leading nowhere, but further into the depths of their sumptuous abyss of sound that nearly bankrupted former British label Creation Records with the studio production of Loveless from 1989-1991. This, their second and last full length studio album, sold only 250,000 copies worldwide, but met with critical acclaim remaining one of the most influential rock albums of the nineties.

After christening and dulling my eardrums with the jagged edges of their guitar distortion, indulging in the viscera of who My Bloody Valentine is, I needed earplugs to cut out the lower and denser sound frequencies normally shrouding their music in mystery. Earplugs submerged me into the music, where I was actually able to hear them. Aloud.