Live Review: My Bloody Valentine & The Morning After Girls

Melbourne's The Morning After Girls set the scene for My Bloody Valentine (MBV) with their hazy shoegaze guitars, playing to the crowd with a rather nonchalant aloofness.

It's astonishing that a band like My Bloody Valentine can disappear for 20 years and make such an effortless comeback, which not only reclaims all their old fans but also attracts many younger listeners. There is no apparent generation gap as we jostle to secure the best possible spot for tonight's much anticipated sold-out show. MBV kick tonight's show off with I Only Said and When You Sleep. Both tunes are perhaps the band's most accessible pop moments buried under heavy drones of hazy guitars. Almost everyone in the house is smiling and eyes glaze over as the music gets euphoric. New You is the only song from their new album to be featured tonight. Marking no specific point of departure for MBV it blends into the mix with older tunes seamlessly. While the guitars are loud, the microphones are irritatingly low, to the extent that Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher's vocals are barely audible. As they delve into tunes from Isn't Anything and their multitude of EPs, MBV start to adopt a more brutal and punishing stance. Come In Alone and Only Shallow false start with Shields scrambling for technical help. MBV find their groove with Thorn, producing a thick dense fog of noise that hangs heavy in the air, at once referencing everything from '60s psychedelic pop to nastier metallic impulses. The simple repetitive riffs have the hypnotic and almost abstract quality of old-school techno, but it all rides much rougher. Butcher and Shield's guitars bounce off each other on the rather manic Feed Me With Your Kiss before the earth shattering You Made Me Realise violently blows up in our faces with a wall of noise that hangs off a single chord. It's such a painfully loud finale that many cover their ears or retreat to the back. After all these years it's great to see MBV back in such spectacularly fine form.