Fluorescent orange earplugs are the new black. Everywhere you look in the Kool Haus, it looks like everyone's head is stuffed with Gatorade gum; the bouncers are even handing out the protective buds at the door like it was some disaster relief effort. Really, they're probably just protecting themselves from any potential lawsuits that may result from tonight's return engagement with Irish dream-pop deities My Bloody Valentine, a band who — following a 16-year hiatus — are making up for lost time and, more pertinently, lost decibels.
But My Bloody Valentine are nothing if not considerate sonic sadists and, as such, they've selected an opening act who prefer to soothe rather than seethe. Led by Torontonian Greg Jarvis, The Flowers of Hell are a 10-piece rockestra trading in maximally minimalist instrumentals, building tranquil two-chord patterns into cello- and sax-splattered crescendos goaded by intensifying Moe Tucker drum stomps. In other words, it's Spiritualized — right down to the phasing effects — but for those who've grown tired of Jason Pierce's ongoing foray into sad-sack gospel balladeering, the Flowers provide a reminder of that band's early space-bound mystique.
The Flowers' slow-building arrangements would seemingly also serve to prepare us for My Bloody Valentine's textural density — except we're instead treated to an unannounced second opening set from Irish indie-folk songstress and MBV pal Gemma Hayes. Accompanied by a male guitarist filling in the acoustic structures with restrained distortion effects, Hayes would probably sound perfectly pleasant in an intimate space (like Supermarket, where she performs tonight). But to a crowd waiting to get their heads blown off by a mushroom cloud of noise, her surprise appearance just feels like a cruel joke, like an electric-chair execution delayed by faulty wiring. It's a feeling that's prolonged by a near 30-minute changeover; then again, there were about, oh, 25 amps to check, and when the roadies unveiled Kevin Shields' effects-pedal board, it was the size of a dining-room table. As David Bowie once observed, "This ain't rock 'n' roll, this is genocide."
But when My Bloody Valentine casually saunter onstage after 10pm and launch into "I Only Said" from 1991's definitive Loveless, you instantly realize that it's not just your ears you need to worry about, but your eyes, too — the song's squealing, dolphins-swimming-in-lava squall is accompanied by a blinding strobe-light barrage that rarely ceases through the night, and threatens to make epileptics out of all of us. As they always have, MBV maintain a blissfully stoic presence amid the sensory obliteration (overload is too passive a word): from a distance, the rumpled Shields looks like Robert Smith gone slacker, while singer/guitarist Bilinda Butcher, with her white dress and bob haircut, resembles a dignified actress from some British domestic drama. Unfortunately, MBV's reputation for bringing the noise in concert — one that, given their extended lay-off, they seem all the more eager to live up to — has overshadowed the fact that, at their heart, they're a pop band, and if Shields and Butcher were never the most assertive vocalists on record, the oversaturated live mix essentially turns the vapour-trail melodies of "When You Sleep" (from 1988's Isn't Anything) and "Thorn" (from the 1988 You Made Me Realise EP) into distant memories.
If a My Bloody Valentine concert inevitably obscures the band's melodic graces, it does offer striking evidence of how crucial a role bassist Debbie Googe and drummer Colm O'Ciosoig play in bringing shape and purpose to the noise, a fact that's not always apparent from the sample-based rhythmic manipulations that drives Loveless. Live, the rhythm section outfits "Only Shallow" with a brawny groove that makes its disorientation danceable, while the post-rave sway of "Soon" teems with hypnotic force.
But of course, just as The Flowers of Hell and Gemma Hayes opened for My Bloody Valentine, My Bloody Valentine is really just the opening act for "You Made Me Realise," a song that, in its original 1988 single form, is a three-minute, 46-second blast of psych-punk fury, but which live has historically had its 40-second mid-song fuzz-note breakdown disemboweled and distended into a 20-minute noise "holocaust" — and for those of us who have never lived through a war, this is probably about as close as we'll (hopefully) ever get.
At first you feel the reverberations in your chest, then your face muscles, then your hair, and by the five-minute mark you half-expect a space shuttle to come launching through the Kool Haus floor. This is a song whose vibrations are so intense, you almost think it's intentionally trying to pry the ear plugs out of your head. This is a song that comes with its own 12-step program (fear, anger, acceptance, bliss…). This is a song that should hand out its own "I Surived 'You Made Me Realise' 08'" souvenir T-shirt. This is a song that should pay the Kool Haus bar staff Workmen's Compensation. This is a song that makes you want to text your parents and tell them you love them one last time. This is a song that makes you forget silence ever existed.
No matter that when the band finally kick back into the song's final verse, the overdriven mix all but robs the move of its surprise-attack impact. Or maybe by this point my brain has lost the ability to process audio and visual information with any degree of coherency. If "You Made Me Realise" makes you realize one thing, it's that My Bloody Valentine's 16-year layoff was not the result of strained band relations, or Shields obsessing over how to top Loveless — they were really just giving us time to recover.