On this, their sixth album, this long-lived instrumental rock outfit begins to see history finally catch up. Onetime adornment of the San Diego maximalist movement of the late 1990s, Upsilon Acrux represents guitarist (and sole ongoing member) Paul Lai’s admirable and altogether successful attempt to be the one-man Henry Cow of his generation. UA’s sound was already wrapped Booker T-tight on 2007’s Galapagos Momentum, so this album represents Lai’s mastery of an ever more capacious bag of tricks, like the start-and-stop headfakes on “Prelude to Foreshadow’n” and the gorgeously maintained 29:21 golem’s march of “Transparent Seas (Radio Edit)”.

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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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Although we have yet to toy around with the Coachooser, we present here (via Goldenvoice and Coachella) the set times for this weekend:

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