We flopped happily far up front at mainstage as lengthening shadows set the mood for My Bloody Valentine. Management was handing out earplugs at the gate and small wonder, since toward the end of “You Made Me Realise,” guitarists Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher (the latter impassive as a Xanax-bombed soccer mom) loosed a gorgeous fifteen-minute-plus feedback annihilation that was easily the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in decades of doting on amplified music. It was less a solo than a hideous (and hideously effective) evocation of nightmare; a compressed and aestheticized variation on the opening bombardment at the Somme, another historic din that produced few actual causalties.

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In the Henry Clay tradition, they finished their set with a lot more people on stage than when they started. To be honest, by time they played their cover of the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” to close their set, I was so wasted, I couldn’t tell if they had all the members of Airborne Toxic Event onstage with them because I was seeing 1 ¼ people for every person at that point. The great part is that considering there was no stage diving and only one moderately scary wipeout—and I never saw more than a dozen or so (actual) people on stage at the same time—is that this was probably their mild show.

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From an email regarding today’s 1.6 rating of their self-titled full-length:

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