The Sound of a Warped Cassette

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Kevin Shields (by Sandy Carson)

I started feeling nauseous during the last 10 minutes of My Bloody Valentine's closing 20-minute squall of sound last night. It was quite a physical feat, actually. The sheer volume being sandblasted via two guitars made my cilia dance, bangs blow off my forehead, and the inside of my cheeks vibrate. It was sonic pressure cleaning. Or, as a friend texted afterwards, "underwaterdistortoblisssss."

My Bloody Valentine left the stage shortly after what's referred to as "the holocaust" that ends "You Made Me Realise," no encore. Not that one was needed. The full house at Austin Music Hall was handed earplugs at the door and treated to nearly 90 minutes of the genre-defining quartet's catalog, the stage lit up in strobing reds and pinks like the cover of their 1991 centerpiece Loveless. An upgrade in gear since they last toured 16 years ago only amplified the group's shimmer and reverb, and in the cavernous Hall, it was massive amounts of whamma-whamma-whoop-wheeeeeer in the monitors. The vocals were unintelligible, merely an accompanying haze from guitarists Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher.

They cherry-picked from Loveless and 1988's Isn't Anything, even going back to their EPs. Set opener "I Only Said" was greeted with screams, and they moved wordlessly into "When You Sleep," "Only Shallow," and "Feed Me With Your Kiss." Amazingly, the band looks like they haven't really aged.

MBV's pioneering sound has been so co-opted it's become a copy of a copy. Not many bands are so influential they can have "esque" added to their name as a descriptor. The sheer magnitude of the show took about 12 hours to sink in, but seeing the genuine artifact was bliss indeed.