Since its 2002 birth by amalgamation, the Aggrolites have evolved from one more clutch of L.A. punks making rattletrap ska-noises to a slick and durable roadshow-reggae act, opening for cult-heroic likes of Madness and Michael Franti & Spearhead. This 21-track sprawl feels like an attempt at a kind of Exile on Main Street—a welter of hooks and ferocity whirling inside a restricted sonic space as emotionally expressive as the blues-rock the Stones pioneered.

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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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