My Bloody Valentine at the Concourse (9/30/08)

I feel like I don’t have the deep visceral connection to My Bloody Valentine that a lot of folks around my same age do. I was aware of them in their heyday, but I didn’t really get into the whole shoegaze genre until well after its moment had passed, and even that was largely through drilling back through the antecedents of other bands and genres that I enjoyed, looking for influences. At that point it was pretty clear that they were big influences on everybody, but I never got quite to the point where I loved the music itself enough to listen to Loveless over and over again.

Nonetheless, the band reformed after years and years and were only playing six shows in all of North America on this tour, and they have a reputation as a mind-blowing live act, so eventually I caved in and bought tickets ($65 – super cheap!). This one show wound up being a weird nexus where tons of my friends from wildly disparate social circles attended a single event. Fortunately the joint is huge and I managed to avoid various inadvisable oil / water combinations.

The evening began in an orthodox San Franciscan fashion, which is to say that I had vague plans to meet up or coordinate with three separate groups of people, and that none of these sets of plans ever quite came to fruition, and also that once I was actually in transit the party I was traveling to meet moved on to a different bar. It’s par for the course, and as a native Californian myself I’m amply equipped to handle these sorts of last-minute adjustments. In any event, after going to and fro in the city, and biking up and down in it, I eventually found myself standing in the Concourse Exhibition Center as the second band, Spectrum, launched into their set. Spectrum is fronted by Sonic Boom of Spiritualized progenitor Spacemen 3, another band whose surface I feel I’ve barely scratched.

Spectrum played for a while and were a good match to MBV ’s sound, though in retrospect they may as well have been some random CD plugged into the venue’s PA by a bored promoter for all the impression their music had on me in comparison with MBV’s sonic assault. Still, they were a good warm-up and their set got better over time as more people filed in to the venue, got drinks, and staked out standing spots. The scuttlebutt had it that the previous band was a flautist, and although the notion of “Sakura” being broadcast over MBV’s inimitable speakers held a certain appeal, my cohorts and I elected not to attend this part of the evening.

This was the first show I’d seen at the Concourse exhibition center, and while the venue didn’t quite live up to its reputation as the worst venue in San Francisco, it wasn’t great either. I wound up standing on the balcony rather close to the stage on the right, from where I was able to see the two guitarists for the majority of the show, though the drummer and bassist were pretty much invisible throughout.

My Bloody Valentine has a famously loud live act, and in this regard they didn’t disappoint. I’d brought earplugs with me, which was fortunate as the ones provided by the Concourse were pretty low-quality. I think I can safely say that this was the loudest show I’ve been to, including Mogwai who are also renowned for the pure volume of their concerts. In addition to being loud, MBV also set up a whole series of incredibly bright strobe lights directly behind, above and around the stage. Incidentally Mogwai also went for the bright strobe light thing, and I found it to be frankly pretty irritating at both shows. I joked to a friend afterwards that it was like enforced shoegazing. MBV doesn’t have the most dynamic stage show ever to begin with, but I felt as though I was being punished for watching them.

Oh, the music? It was OK. I honestly don’t know their work well enough to pick out songs by name, but there were a good number of tracks I recognized from Loveless. The sound tended to blend into itself and it was often hard to distinguish between instruments (in particular, the bass and rhythm guitar frequently got lost in the mix). Possibly due to our particular location in the venue, the drums seemed way too loud, particularly when the drummer made a prolonged attack on the toms, which seemed to be one of his favorite tactics. The vocals were not terribly clear, but the same is true for MBV’s recorded works.

The band closed out with a good 15-20 minutes of incredibly loud feedback, but not in a high-pitched, ear-splitting way. I could feel my clothes moving during this; it was somewhat impressive technically, but seemed a little self-indulgent.

Overall I had a pretty good time. If I hadn’t managed to get the relatively good spot that I did I think I might have loathed the entire event, and indeed I’ve read a lot of bad reviews of this show. It’s going to take a pretty amazing show to get me to go back to the Concourse, but I actually didn’t find the venue to be as hateful as I expected it to be, and I feel glad to have seen My Bloody Valentine.