Earplugs.
Seldom does the thought of gauzing my ears at a concert make an appeal for attention the morning of a highly anticipated show. Checking Facebook before a long-planned trip to see a reunited My Bloody Valentine in New York City, a friend posted that he went to their performance on the previous night, and may have suffered hearing loss from the waves of noise and distortion played at levels approaching the threshold of pain. Before I hopped on the bus to New York, I made sure to discuss a plan with my travel comrade, John, to stop at a Duane Reade pharmacy and pick up enough earplugs to shield the ears of all in our party. Surely I was not being overly cautious. I was correct in that assumption. John mentioned that free earplugs are supplied at all My Bloody Valentine shows.
Ear protection was available for all concertgoers at the Roseland Ballroom. You could pick up your pair at the security checkpoint, the merchandise table, the bar. The plugs were soft and pulp-like, not to mention quite slippery. I was not the only person who nearly lost one of the plugs in my ear canal. They stayed wrapped in cellophane through the opening act, the Lilys, who weaved through material old and new, indebted to MBV-ish shoegaze and Kinks-style pop, respectively. I kept the earplugs in my shirt pocket until Colm O'Ciosoig stepped up to his drum set and tested the bass drum pedal. They then went immediately in my ears.
My Bloody Valentine live is nothing more than a fantastic spectacle of light and sound. Opener "I Only Said," from their undeniable masterpiece, Loveless, charged forth with the fuzzed-out dueling guitar explosions of Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher and the pulsing thump of O' Ciosoig's bass pedal. Though it was the synchronized strobe lights that made me reconsider the meaning of shoegaze; a few songs had passed before I felt fully comfortable staring straight at the stage. Shields led the band into a false start or two, though most of the show was a perfected stream of shimmering guitar noise, vocals buried deep in the mix. What MBV perfected in the studio, they honed on stage. The guitars were as complex as they were loud, with low-end hums matching the screeches of feedback. Of course, I tried to adjust my reception of the performance between the aural comfort and discomfort supplied by the earplugs and the band.
John suggested I keep in only the plug in my right ear to mix the treble-muted filter of the earplug with the raw feedback coming from the speakers. I then tried switching the earplug to the left ear. As we were standing on the right side of the stage below the speaker column, only a split second was needed to deem this a very bad idea. I settled on keeping the spongy blue cylinders docked in my ear cavity, with the occasional removal from my left ear to better hear the vocals and guitar squeals.
MBV worked through most of Loveless along with a few tracks from their 1988 LP Isn't Anything and EP You Made Me Realise. They had flown through their set in about an hour when Shields mumbled a quick "thanks for coming" into the microphone and led the band into "You Made Me Realise." A regular set closer in their heyday, the song was interrupted by a twenty-minute jam...of noise. Shields and Butcher's "swirling" guitars blanketed the ballroom with near-infinite distortion and feedback as bassist Debbie Gouge and O' Ciosoig provided the rhythmic thuds. Crowd reaction changed from amazement to intrigue to confusion. Most fans succumbed to the unrelenting attack of noise and slowly raised their arms over their heads in religious submission to the power of the sound. They were being blown away by My Bloody Valentine. The vibrating waves of shoegaze were strong enough to shake the ground and raise the hair on your head. I kept myself busy for most of the interlude by fiddling with my left earplug, creating a pleasant whooshing sound as I filtered the feedback in and out of my ear. After the euphoria passed, confusion once again set in until MBV finished their long winded sentence and jumped back into the final phrases of "Realise."
Right before their final song, I was milling over the MBV performance trying to reconcile a mesmerizing hour of music that simultaneously felt underwhelming, given the immeasurable hype of the show. The 20 minutes of noise, not unique for an MBV set, changed my opinion of what I just witnessed as I left the Roseland. You can't really clamor for more when you were holding your ears closed for the several previous minutes. At the same time, I felt satisfied after watching a band pound my senses yet do it with precision and craft. My ears survived as well, thanks to the security checkpoint.
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