The seismic needles twitching in Chinese military bunkers can only mean one of two things. Either the UK has resumed nuclear testing or My Bloody Valentine are touring again. The Irish-English noiseniks materialising on the Wembley stage in washes of womb colours – pinks, purples, sunrise oranges – for their first London show in seven years are probably most famous for crystalising the shoegaze sound with their 1988 debut album Isn’t Anything, then killing the genre stone dead with their unmatchable 1991 masterpiece Loveless, a record now being ranked – not unreasonably – amongst the best ever made. But they’re also widely renowned as being one of the loudest bands on the planet. There were angle-saw metalworkers who ran screaming from their aircraft-volume Roundhouse shows in 2008.
Armed from the sackfuls of free earplugs at every entrance, Wembley noticeably braces itself for the first chord from mainman Kevin Shields’ godlike guitar. But, take it from a veteran of many of their half-hour hell-chord finales, MBV go relatively easy on us tonight. As I Only Said hits like a velvet tsunami, drenched in hazy butterfly visuals and resembling birdsong over Chernobyl, the volume is enough to make Bastille soil themselves but nothing the average noise rock fanatic who lives near a steelworks can’t handle.
This has pros and cons. On the plus side, at no point does anything feel like it might haemorrhage. Undistorted, To Here Knows When floats by in a state of brutal bliss and You Never Should is volcanic without going full Pompeii on your eardrums. On the other hand, MBV’s live greatness has always rested in their ability to subsume audiences in sound, the gossamer vocal melodies of Shields and fellow singer Bilinda Butcher seeming to haunt their barrages of elemental noise, by turns gorgeous and gruesome. The intention and effect has been to put the audience inside the music, and tonight, that punch is somewhat pulled. Though the stratospheric synth hooks of When You Sleep still land like friendly bombs, more cosmic tracks from 2013’s third album m b v struggle to either charm or overwhelm: New You doesn’t so much take off as inhabit a hypnotic orbit, while the cranky wash of Only Tomorrow could only be considered “oceanic” on a Jovian moon with nitrous oxide seas.
With no further whiff of new material since the premature announcement of two new albums four years ago – one melodic, one experimental, both as yet unreleased - there’s plenty of space for fan-pleasing, yet the set is heavy on old EP b-sides which struggle to find form amid the fuzz. There are also numerous technical hitches and restarts – “it’s an age thing,” Shields admits. But over the course of two hours MBV use Wembley’s cavernous, noise-limited environs to their advantage, creating drama and dynamic. Cigarette in Your Bed glides towards blasts of ear-bursting bass hook, and when Loveless opener Only Shallow arrives in an onslaught of heaven metal it melts grateful faces. They’re also blessed with some of the most euphoric moments in all of music. The transcendent Come in Alone is the song in the head of a burning monk. Soon is a glorious, cleansing flood of psychedelic rave. Wonder 2 does the same for nosebleed jungle.
With the werewolf goth of Feed Me With Your Kiss dispatched, MBV finally unleash You Made Me Realise, their notorious set-closer previously known to climax in 30 obliterating, chest-rattling minutes of one-chord scree, dubbed the “holochord”. It’s kept to a merciful six minutes tonight, but is still a stunning insight into what it sounds like to actually be thunder. Even on a (relatively) quiet night, there remains no live experience like My Bloody Valentine, where noise and melody so wonderfully intertwine.
