Getting throttled to My Bloody Valentine with 9,500 people

I’m at the biggest shoegaze show of all time, and the vibe is a parody of the genre’s stereotypically coy character. All 9,500 fans shuffle politely to their seats in Dublin’s 3Arena, nestling gently in between the stiff armrests and murmuring softly to one another while ambient music seeps from the house speakers. Beers are sipped and popcorn is munched with a degree of reservation and tact that’s normally associated with a quiet night out at the cinema. Unless you were conditioned to recognize the precise pinkish hue that bathes every particle in the room in soft light, then you’d have no idea that the loudest band ever are about to formally take the stage for the first time in seven years. And once they do, it’ll become clear why no one’s speaking above their indoor voices. Everybody in this room, from wide-eyed children to white-haired 70-somethings, traveled here to dissolve. To transcend. To shut up and soak in the dulcet ecstasies and distorted whines of My Bloody Valentine.

This gig is historic on several counts. For one, it really is the biggest shoegaze show ever. Discounting major festivals where shoegaze bands only account for a portion of the draw, no group in the idiom of reverb-smeared sing-songs and fuzz-fried guitar lashings have ever attracted nearly 10,000 high-decibel daredevils to their headlining show. Let alone a band like My Bloody Valentine who never had a radio hit, have only released one album in the last 30 years, and hardly have any discernible lyrics across their untouchably eccentric catalog. Moreover, it’s momentous that this comeback show, happening at the peak popularity of the shoegaze genre MBV invented nearly four decades ago, is taking place in Dublin.

Ireland’s capital city is where My Bloody Valentine’s initial incarnation was formed, and quickly chased out of for not fitting into the cliquey local scene, in the early 80s. Over the next few years, the band shook off their obvious post-punk influences while bopping between Amsterdam and Berlin before eventually settling in London, where they developed their signature mix of ghastly ethereality and savage power: the beginnings of shoegaze. Although the genre is now most associated with England, Dublin is the real origin point of shoegaze’s imperial pioneers. MBV choosing to end their latest bout of dormancy here is a particular point of pride that several Dublin locals express to me throughout the weekend. Before the show, an MBV merch pop-up in Dublin’s tourist district drew a block-circling queue of diehards who waited two hours in the cold to snatch snazzy “Loveless” beanies.

My Bloody Valentine operate on their own clock. Fans have become accustomed to rumblings about new music that never actually materializes — until it suddenly does. It took Kevin Shields and Co. 19 years to follow their 1991 guitar landmark, Loveless, with 2013’s surprise-drop m b v, and although Shields swore a few years back that fresh material is imminent, there’re no breadcrumbs at tonight’s show.

In fact, the gig feels more like a commemoration of the past than a journey into the future. Their 19-song set is specially curated for lifelong fans, and the show’s giddy atmosphere is dampened by a mournful reminder that MBV’s musical generation — of acid house, Madchester, and oddball guitar bands playing with major label money — isn’t getting any younger.

Two nights earlier, Gary “Mani” Mounfield, a fixture of the early 90s U.K. scene who played with The Stone Roses and Primal Scream, died at age 63, the median age of MBV’s membership. During the show, Shields takes one of his few two-sentence banter breaks to dedicate the night to Mani’s memory. It’s a funereal tinge to an otherwise vigorous set. Despite physically aging — gracefully, yet undeniably — as humans do, MBV’s music and musicianship remains timeless. After a terrifically gauzy dream-pop set from Dublin’s own Maria Somerville, MBV casually strut onstage to cordially enthusiastic claps and cheers. Given the band’s reputation for sending onlookers dashing out of venues with their ears plugged, and for delivering physical gusts of noise into the chests of those who dare to remain, we’re all anticipating the scale of sensory obliteration that will rumble this cavernous arena.

At first, the volume isn’t abnormally throttling, but as the set crescendos in intensity, the decibels creep higher and higher. MBV kick off with a couple Loveless classics, “I Only Said” and “When You Sleep,” and the most striking feature is just how hard those songs groove. MBV are known for Shields’ guitar heroics and for his and Bilinda Butcher’s phantasmically muted coos, but drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig and bassist Debbie Googe are also pivotal to how these songs resonate.

While Shields and Butcher stand stock still in front of their microphones, strumming their whammy bars with an animatronic consistency, the rhythm section rocks out; Cíosóig battering his drums with youthful force and Googe posing in front of the kit in a bent-knee power stance, frequently holding up her bass to strum horizontally with a punk-rock verve. Still, shoegaze in general, and MBV especially, have never been in the business of inciting physical reactions. The faster tracks from their early years (“You Never Should,” “You Made Me Realise”) stir up a small mosh pit at the front of the stage, but the majority of the audience spends the show locked in an audio-visual trance. The giant screens behind the band display a series of looping videos that attempt to illustrate MBV’s metaphysical splendor: tubular vortexes, fragments forming and breaking, and a birds-eye view of a pixelated cityscape that’s coated in Loveless pink.

“Louder?” Shields quips into the microphone roughly halfway through the set. The crowd, whose cheers have grown more animated in between songs, screams back in ecstatic approval. “To Here Knows When” is the song MBV struggled to get right at the semi-secret dress rehearsal show they played a few nights earlier, but tonight they nail it on the first go, and the frequencies sound dense enough to carve a smiley face into.

I check my earplugs to make sure they’re still in there (they are), and the little clumps of foam have their strength tested during the last leg of the set. “Soon,” the baggy-’gaze Loveless closer that ranks among Brian Eno’s favorite songs ever, sounds like a fucking cannon blast when the guitars hit. Hearing it in this context, at this volume, while merrily drunk Gen-Xers a few seats over sway intuitively, and a man down the arena stands up and wiggles to the beat like an Evangelical Christian speaking in tongues, verifies that “Soon” is an unquestionable contender for the greatest song of the 90s. For the 80s, it might be “You Made Me Realise.” Everyone knows the notorious end-cap is coming, the ritualistic part of MBV’s set when the band deconstruct into a searing noise jam that’s famously lasted upwards of 45 minutes before they reel back and finish the song.

Once the breakdown of “You Made Me Realise” hits, you can feel everybody in the room buckle securely into their seats and brace for impact. As the feedback squeals, fog pours from either side of the stage, blanketing either side of the pit in a chalky haze. I instinctively poke my earplugs (still there) and then close my eyes to block out every other node of stimulation and focus purely on the unholy racket. It sounds like a train rolling into the station that never arrives. It’s apparently unsustainable for some audience members, who begin filing toward the exits while the band diligently feed the flames of noise. Then, like shaking an Etch a Sketch, the band wipe away their infernal creation and return to the jerky thrusts of “You Made Me Realise.” The mosh pit doubles in size. People around me stand up and howl. The shoegazers have become untamed.

When the song finally concludes, the band coolly stroll off stage while everyone whistles and whinnies for an encore. Of course, MBV have plenty of unplayed songs left over, but asking for more after “You Made Me Realise” feels gratuitous. Like the particles of dust on the screen, my brain feels like it was disintegrated and put back together in a slightly different order, and my hands are literally tingling with excess dopamine. The house lights flip back on and a soft, psych-pop balm begins to spritz down from the speakers. It’s The Stone Roses’ classic “Waterfall.” “She’ll carry on through it all / She’s a waterfall,” goes the chorus. Indeed, our brains, liquified from My Bloody Valentine’s aural deluge, carry on just fine.

I Only Said
When You Sleep
New You
You Never Should
Honey Power
Cigarette In Your Bed
Only Tomorrow
Come In Alone
Only Shallow
Off Your Face
Thorn
Nothing Much To Lose
Who Sees You
To Here Knows When
Slow
Soon
Wonder 2
Feed Me With Your Kiss
You Made Me Realise