Three unreleased My Bloody Valentine songs. Three. You know what I know, which isn’t much, plus what you know (Johari Window lolz).  These songs evidently were recorded sometime between Isn’t Anything and Loveless, and for whatever reason, surfaced just last week. If anyone has more info on this, give me a shout in the comments.

The conspiring part of my brain wonders if perhaps these were leaked deliberately to generate excitement for, supposedly, a new album from Kev and the Gang in the not too distant future.

Perhaps the details are menial anyway. All that matters is that “Bilinda Song” rips hard and Xmas came early for Kenny Bloggins this year.

MP3 :::
My Bloody Valentine – Cowboy Song
My Bloody Valentine – Kevin Song
My Bloody Valentine – Bilinda Song

I think full contact St. Patrick’s Day would me more interesting, don’t you? Rather than simply pinching someone who wasn’t wearing green, you mow them down with your car. Because wearing green is so important, you see. It’s a good style.

Speaking of good styles, here’s a quick and dirty mix of music that traces the general trajectory of slamming car bombs all night – from the good time to the sickness. The picture above is, indeed, the Chicago River. I definitely recommend going to Chicago for St. Patty’s Day and also, surprisingly, Savannah, Georgia.  Savannah’s celebration is huge and amazing (with better weather), and if you can avoid pockets of brodeo, you’ll have a really good time.

MP3 :::
Roxy Music – A Really Good Time
West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – Endless Night
Times New Viking – My Head
Nothing People – Sickness
My Bloody Valentine – Swallow (band formed in Ireland – see what I did there?)

With copious apologies, I regret not updating much the past couple of weeks.  I’m a dickfor.  I’ve had a lot going on with the holiday safari, relocation, yadda yadda.  But I will make it up to you with the promise of a new day, more updates, and a nice rare treat.

Illuminati was a compilation released in 1998, featuring various artists of varying caliber covering their favorite jam styles by Creation/C86 group The Pastels.  Actually, covering is not the right term, these are remixes. The majority of the compilation is quite glitch-centric, well informed by groups like To Rococo Rot and Mouse on Mars, and interestingly enough, retaining the original vocals of Stephen McRobbie.  However, there are some serious curveball artists on Illuminati as well, including My Bloody Valentine and Third Eye Foundation.

The MBV remixes are closer to Kevin Sheilds’ production work on Primal Scream’s Evil Heat and his thousand minute or so architecting of “Mogwai Fear Satan” for the Kicking a Dead Pig compilation than traditional MBV material.  So really, it’s just Kev, not My Bloody Valentine.  But never you mind, it’s still worth a listen.

Third Eye Foundation, if you’re not familiar, deserves a little degrees of separation mention.  Third Eye Foundation was the project of Matt Elliot of Flying Saucer Attack, who also wrote under the name Linda’s Strange Vacation, which featured Kate Wright of Movietone, who was also part of FSA.  Regular readers of this blog know that I feel morally obligated to drop Flying Saucer Attack on a regular basis, as they are the best shoegaze/noise/space rock band ever.  This can be statistically proven, though I don’t have the gumption to draft up a proof at this time.

My favorite Pastels song, from the Patron Saints of Teenage comp for Creation Records, is included for your consideration.  Read up on Creation if you’re just now diggin’ on it.

MP3 :::
The Pastels – Baby Honey
My Bloody Valentine – Cycle
My Bloody Valentine – Magic Nights
Third Eye Foundation – On the Way

Alright, as promised, here’s the full set from My Bloody Valentine’s Aragon performance on Sept. 27.

This bootleg is every bit as clear as the Loom record (and oh junk, I have that too), with an even more balanced mix. As I mentioned in my commentary on the show, you can’t hear the vocals in this recording (with a few exceptions like “Thorn”) because you couldn’t hear the vocals at the show either. That’s the way Kevin wants it, and I shan’t question it. These recordings are in .FLAC format (a super high quality audio file), so you may need to convert them to your preferred file type. I use Switch. Switch features a convenient drag-and-drop GUI, so converting should be easy breezy for you. However, lots of media software supports the .FLAC file extension, so try it out first and keep it in the high quality format if you can. If you have any issues, contact me and I’ll see if I can help.

For extra reading whilst listening (or something to occupy your time while downloading), get a little back story on the arduous time leading up to Loveless, and the nerd fight between Creation Records head Alan McGee and Kevin Shields, here.

Again, thanks for Julian at Roof’s Up and “Alien Rendel,” the mystery recorder of this show. I probably don’t have to mention this, but I will anyway… when downloading bootlegs, remember to support the people to bring it to you. If you’re diggin’ on the show, but don’t own a My Bloody Valentine album (a travesty in and of itself), you should correct that here. I’m fond of the Tremolo EP, myself. And of course, if you like the myriad bootlegs and MP3s you find here (and my general surly and sardonic prose), be a champ – please tell your friends about this blog and link to me if you have a website or blog yourself.

Chicago – Aragon – 9.27.08 Setlist:

I Only Said
When You Sleep
You Never Should
When You Wake (You’re Still in a Dream)
Cigarette In Your Bed
Come In Alone
Only Shallow
Thorn
Nothing Much To Lose
To Here Knows When
Slow
Soon
Feed Me With Your Kiss
You Made Me Realise / Holocaust Section

ZIP :::
My Bloody Valentine – Chicago, 9.27.08 (approx. 485 Mb)

MP3 :::
My Bloody Valentine – You Never Should (Live in Chicago)
My Bloody Valentine – Soon (Live in Chicago)

No need for any commentary here – behold three choice tracks from last weekend’s My Bloody Valentine concert / religious sermon in Chicago. The audio quality is outstanding, so I assume this recording is directly from the soundboard. I plan to have the entire set up soon (probably Monday or Tuesday), so look out for that. That reminds me… yeah, why don’t you subscribe to the Decibel Tolls RSS feed, so you’re the first to know when I unload shipments of awesome on this blog?

Jump over here to read my, more or less, “review” of the show while you’re listening. And of course, I need to thank my friend at Roof’s Up for pointing me in the direction of this excellent bootleg (originally recorded by a gentleman with the handle “Alien Rendel”), as well as for the choice photo above.

In other news, the Sun Times’ Jim DeRogatis is still a moron.

UPDATE 10.6: The entire show is now up.

MP3 :::
My Bloody Valentine – Cigarette in Your Bed (Live in Chicago)
My Bloody Valentine – Thorn (Live in Chicago)
My Bloody Valentine – Slow (Live in Chicago)

I’m not going to review the My Bloody Valentine show, at least in the traditional sense. Any show review more than a couple of paragraphs long while taking itself very seriously is innately stupid. At that juncture, such writing is fodder-saturated music critic masturbation, an attempt at trying to connect multiple points together and relate them to a particular concert or band when all you’re really doing is trying to show the world how smart you are. Fuck that. Unless it’s the Concert for Bangledesh, a live show is nothing more than a band who wants to rock it out in front of other people besides themselves and their recording engineer. It’s as simple as that. A long review also, statistically speaking, permits the phrase “rocked the [insert venue name]” to rear its ugly dome at some point, which I will not stand for.

So instead, I’d like to stave off the pretense and simply construct a grocery list of thoughts, then provide you with a couple of videos to czech out. First, I want to talk about my day today. How was yours? Well, great, that’s good to hear. Well, mine’s been busy. Besides uploading videos and returning missed calls, I’ve been taking time to learn American Sign Language.

I did something bad, you see. I took my earplugs out during the Holocaust Section. I did this for these reasons three. First, I wanted to experience it as it was meant to be heard. Secondly, the curiosity began to overtake me. It’s like when you have a friend, right, who says “hey man, take a whiff of this, it smells like shit.” You proceed to inhale the pungent, odiferous substance despite the disclaimer that you may not want to take a whiff of said substance or object. We all have this friend, and all do these things because we’re stupid and we do what our friends tell us. Kenny Bloggins has demonstrated time and time again that he is not a bright person, and proceeds to do things just like that. Third, I was feeling brave as I was rather drunk. We enjoyed a steady stream of screwdrivers at Bloggins Base Camp, the decided pre-game rendezvous nay two L stops from the Aragon, and preceded to continue with shitty domestic beer throughout the evening. So by the time the Holocaust Section rolled around, I was feelin’ groovy and ready and willing to do something dumb.

I now can’t hear a goddamn thing. Friends on the west coast attending this week’s shows – do not do this. This is a very bad idea. I now have severe tinnitus. This frequency buzzing in my ear right now… it’s loud, and it’s dying a slow death. I’ll miss not hearing this frequency ever again. It’s a good one. Now, the grocery list of thoughts on last night’s show:

1) One word: Biblical. Beautiful and unseasonably warm (78 degrees, breezy) day in Chicago, perfect for a religious experience.

2) Hopewell opened the show. They are a terrible band. If Incubus decided to experiment with dream pop, they would sound like Hopewell. The drummer rocked a mean faux-hawk. Not to be superficial, but if you’re in charge of finding support for the first appearance in over 17 years of a musically revolutionary/culturally vital group, conventional wisdom tells you to steer away from bands who elect, on their own volition, to sport a faux-hawk, ironically or otherwise. Hopewell pissed me off. I tried to think of a clever “1997 called and they want their radio-ready unit-pushin’ band back,” but nothing came to fruition. I can’t believe they’re on Tee Pee Records, who boasts an impressive roster of like-minded bands like Entrance, Brian Jonestown Massacre, and Earthless, since those groups rule and Hopewell does a lot of other things that don’t include “ruling.” Also, unless you’re a rhythmically complex, percussively intriguing band (Caribou and Warmer Milks come to mind, for example), you don’t need two drummers. Most listeners can’t even tell that you have two drummers. All you do is give the show’s sound engineer a big fuckin’ headache.

3) The live show demonstrates that MBV is not just an aural representation of what’s in Kevin Shields’ head. They are a rock band. Colm O’ Ciosig is a visually engaging, technically mind-blowing drummer. Debbie Googe’s low-end hellride is fluid and gravitational. I have no idea where the “shoegaze” term came from. Sure, Kev just sort drifts to the back and hangs out, but Debbie is straight Headbangers Ball. She rocked out on a very handsome Gibson Thunderbird bass, and danced like no one was watching. Sure, MBV is a concept, but they’re also an incredibly tight and monolithic live act – a formidable force.

4) If your girlfriend’s retarded, please don’t bring her to a watershed event such as the MBV reunion. This inconvenient bitch in front of us was, I believe, aboard the X-press train and bumping into us throughout the entire show, flailing her arms around and epically boogying. She kept trying to, I think, grind dance with my girlfriend and I despite the fact that a) we obviously weren’t interested, and b) you can’t dance to “Cigarette in Your Bed.” Seriously, cut it out. If you can’t control your shit, don’t leave the Grotto. This giggly little hoop-earringed, fluffy red blouse broad almost got knocked the fuck out by L-Dog, who is about a foot taller, a wicked ol’ dame, and was halfway to livid. Heads almost rolled, so luckily, Scottie 2 Hottie valiantly escorted his inamorata out of there before she was abruptly ended… or at least forcibly launched across the room. So here’s your Decibel Tolls public service announcement: most reasonable people, like L-Dog, have a rather low bullshit threshold. Guys, before you bring your shorty out, consider – does my girlfriend act like a shockingly stupid asshole when she drinks/does drugs? If the answer is yes, then either keep her from consuming the finer things in life, or let her hang out at the frat house or somethin’ where that behavior is more tolerated than a concert of this variety, one where people are trying to have a profound experience. MBV is my church. How would you like it if I crashed your youth group gathering to act like a fucking dick?

5) Visuals are important to me. Most of the bands I like to see don’t shred finger-tap solos whilst riding their guitar like a cock out of hell. As such, you better have some sort of visual element to your show. MBV delivered. I love the look of grainy 8mm film, especially when it’s rapidly cut. Lots of bucolic imagery plastered itself across the entire length of the Aragon stage, cultivating a truly psychedelic experience.

6) Bradford Cox likened the Holocaust Section as standing in front of a nuclear reactor, causing his balls to retract. My friend Jerry described it as sitting under a Saturn V rocket during lift-off without being burned. I can’t think of any better way to describe it. You can’t differentiate tones accurately beyond 140 decibels, which is ten above the threshold of pain for human beings. Mogwai clocked in at about 137 decibels, and as I mention in this story, almost completely blew the power for the entire building they were playing in. The structure of the building was constructed sometime around 1910, when the idea of 137 decibels was a nebulous endeavor. The building and adjacent structures actually shook and vibrated. The other insanely loud band I’ve witnessed was delightful noise hip-hop group, Dalek, who’s massive sound and intensity comes from using clean, direct input samples turned at high volume peppered with tones and frequencies whose timbre burrow deep into your ear canal. My Bloody Valentine is a different type of loud. If I had to guess, it had to be around 145 decibels (I’d be interested to know if anyone out there has an exact figure). It’s the type of loud wherein every single frequency in the audible spectrum is filled to capacity. It was thick enough to cut with a knife. During the Holocaust Section, I kept inhaling through my nose because it tickled. My nostrils vibrated in and out as a breathed due to the sheer number of molecules being pushed and pulverized by the sound waves fluttering about. I felt like I was hit in the face. There were reports from last weekend’s ATP that the band actually dislodged pieces of the ceiling during the 25 minute ordeal. I believe it.

7) There were three distinct reactions to the Holocaust Section. You either threw your arms in the air and embraced the Second Coming, you covered ears and mouthed “nooooo,” or you tried to leave the premises. I had the elusive fourth reaction: the feeling that a monk might have when he decides it’s time to dedicate his life to the church. Let me know what Good Works I can do for you, Kevin.

Eight) Yes, the acoustics in the cavernous Aragon do suck, and wipe out a lot of the sonic subtlety that is critical to the texture of MBV. This said, I was expecting to hear a less-than-clear show. The ballroom just isn’t meant for amplification. It was just like seeing Low at the Singletary Center for the Arts at the University of Kentucky – an amplified band in a room meant for acoustic acts. In some ways, though, I love the roar this scenario produces. It becomes disorienting, which I like. You lose yourself. By the way, I had to type out “eight” so Wordpress didn’t turn it into a smiley face. What the fuck?

9) I cannot give you any more insight into the show if you weren’t there, other than MBV did not disappoint. Thinking about that, it would be very hard to not disappoint, considering the length of their absence, the group’s mystique, and the general hype and celebration behind this tour. Kevin and friends had a lot riding on these shows, and they delivered the goods, at least Saturday night in Chicago. I feel lucky to have been there.

10) It is my belief that there will be no professional shots of this show. We saw no press in the barricaded section in front of the stage, presumably the photo pit. I tried to snag a photo pass from Mr. P at Tiny Mix Tapes, who related to me that pretty much nobody was getting a photo pass.

This is the best video of the batch, the show opener “I Only Said,” which I immediately posted here yesterday. I’m impressed by the sound quality considering how small my camera is versus how insanely loud MBV is. You can’t hear the vocals in the video because, well, you can’t hear the vocals in the mix in real life either.

The sound on my video for “When You Wake” is pretty satisfactory. However, I’m disappointed that, for some reason, I decided to constantly pan the camera left and right. I’m really sorry I did this. It’s annoying

And here’s a 30 second clip of the Holocaust Section, about 10 minutes in. That’s all you get, 30 seconds. But I clocked it at approximately 28 minutes, give or take one. I was standing by the beer line on the periphery because, well, you should sip on a man soda whilst your face melts off your skull. Plus, this was best enjoyed from a bit of a distance. I didn’t have a death wish that evening. Also, did you know that there’s drumming in the Holocaust Section? Yeah, me neither… I found that out when I took the earplugs out and the high end appeared in the mix all of the sudden. My good friend J-Rowdy Risner helped me upload this one, and he describes it well: “My Bloody Valentine tests the structural integrity of the Aragon.”

My favorite moments from Saturday’s performance included the B-side “Slow” and the whammy bar plus rhythm section assault of “Nothing Much to Lose.” The MP3s below aren’t from the Chicago show, but sound pretty similar nonetheless. Don’t forget about the soundboard quality vintage bootlegs I have over here.

Chicago – Aragon – 9.27.08 Setlist:

I Only Said
When You Sleep
You Never Should
When You Wake
Cigarette In Your Bed
Come In Alone
Only Shallow
Thorn
Nothing Much To Lose
To Here Knows When
Slow
Soon
Feed Me With Your Kiss
You Made Me Realise / Holocaust Section

MP3 :::
My Bloody Valentine – Slow (Live)
My Bloody Valentine – Nothing Much to Lose (Live)

More on their way, probably tomorrow… in the meantime enjoy “I Only Said”.

I wasn’t able to listen this weekend. I regret it. I’m sure there are many more like me. So I ask ye… who out there recorded Lilys, Lightning Bolt, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Alexander Tucker, Om, Bardo “Motherfuckin” Pond, Wooden Shjips, My Bloody Valentine, and/or Growing a la WFMU’s stream this weekend? WFMU did not archive the jams, so the psychedelic community will handsomely reward anyone who steps up with hugs, kisses, and possibly some weeeeed. I found a few, but not many… MP3s that is, not weed.

Stereogum has some Lightning Bolt jams, along with some choice photos (I had no idea Wooden Shjips were, like, old). I found Lilys’ set as well. No MBV bootlegs just yet, but remember that I have lots of MBV goodies, here and here.

I really wanna grip some live BJM though, if anyone’s on that tip. KB [at] thedecibeltolls.com, beeeotch. I will send you a gift bag by way of USPS if you gots the goods.

Speaking of Stereogum, I’ve been pretty impressed by their Outsiders series. They recently did a nice write-up about my friends Hair Police. I know I like to rag on the big guys, but hats off to the ‘gum for attempting to report on music other than Vampire Weekend and the subsequent boners they produce. This week, they feature U.S. Girls, who I’ve been tryin’ to czech out for a while but haven’t sans any good excuse at all.

MP3 :::
Lilys at All Tomorrow’s Parties, 9.21.08
My Bloody Valentine – Noise Interlude (Live)

A fun thought experiment I like to engage in with friends, neighbors, and peers concerns what particular public figures are doing right now, at this moment. Last week on FaCeBoOk, I played “What is Sarah Palin Doing Right Now?” with everyone. Many of my cohorts left decidedly excellent responses – everything from cleaning muskets, to shooting polar bears, to grilling mooseburgers, to Wikipedia-ing “VP,” to activities and extracurriculars that I dare not reprint here. Despite my penchant for making cusses every now and again, I try to keep this blog PG-13.

Time to play again! What do you, dear reader, think that Alan McGee, founder of Creation Records, is doing right now? My educated inference: he’s probably still waxin’ on why and how much he, with the fury of colliding galaxies, loathes Kevin Shields. Dude hates Kevin Shields

Kevin has never struck me as an unsavory fellow – manic maybe, but always polite – so one could assume that McGee is still sore from him spending all of his cheese on an album that McGee never really saw much money from, and subsequently played a factor in his meltdown around that time. The two-year Loveless recording cost a quarter of a million pounds (spent mostly in payments for 18 different engineers who worked on it), eventually bankrupting Creation and prompting McGee to sell half of his enterprise to Sony. Creation was laid to rest in 1999, and McGee has stated that, to this day, he can still only stomach listening to Oasis (ahoy!), as they were the only Creation group that recouped their expenses. Take a gander at this sneer of unsurmountable bummed-outness. As often indicative of the times in which we live, the least culturally significant of acts often corollate to the most commercially viable. Not trying to be a snob here, but it’s futile to ignore the sweeping smorgasbord of dongs that Oasis sucks upon (that might be one motive as to why Noel Gallagher got his ass sacked last week). Despite the critical lauding and undeniable musical impact of Loveless and other earlier Creation releases, the means did not justify the end for McGee, financially or emotionally.

From the Guardian:
“Loveless was a factor in my personal meltdown,” McGee [said]. Creation, he explains, dropped My Bloody Valentine after the album’s release because he couldn’t face working with the temperamental band-leader again. “It was either him or me,” says McGee, who was reduced to tearfully pleading with the musician to deliver the record before the whole enterprise went bankrupt.

You would never suspect that behind Shields’s unassuming exterior lay such a monster. “That,” says McGee, “is called passive-aggressive.” Legend has it that Shields, infuriatingly, would respond to demands as to when his magnum opus would be finished by blankly reciting My Bloody Valentine song titles: To Here Knows When. When You Sleep. Sometimes. Soon.“

McGee is still bitter, and has already condemned the MBV “reunion” (I use reunion in quotes as the group never, technically, broke up):

“My Bloody Valentine were my comedy band,” McGee said in 2007. “Ride were different – they were a rock band, really, a fantastic rock band – but My Bloody Valentine were a joke, my way of seeing how far I could push hype.“

All things considered, this isn’t a particularly unfair reaction. It’s hard to buddy up with someone who, directly or indirectly, sank your company and squandered your investment, regardless of whether the product was a masterpiece. No one except Kevin and Alan know the complete story, and as such, I maintain an equal respect for both men and their contribution to music. The quotes and general Behind the Music worthy anecdotes are fun nonetheless.

Of course, McGee has a lot else going on right now, from DJing around the UK as Death Disco, to writing for the aforementioned Guardian, to teaching and consulting. It’s good to see him making lemonade. It’s unfortunate, though, that he doesn’t sit back in his recliner and say “man, Creation was pretty brilliant.”

Because it was! Creation, for all intents and purposes, was the most important record label of its time. Creation, named after the mid ’60s English psychedelic pop group, singlehandedly created a second psychedelic age in the late ’80s.

OMG… DID SUMONE SAY ’80s?! I LUV TEH 80s!!!11!!!one!1!

Irrelevant sidenote: Sorry, I have to make fun of ’80s obsessed morons whenever I have the chance. At the music venue I worked at, we had ’80s night every Friday after whatever concert was that night. It usually started around 1a.m., and you felt the room get stupider around that time. But hey, I can’t say too much as this event’s bar sales average pretty much funded my modest paycheck.

Okay, where was I?

Oh, yes, Creation in the ’80s. Primal Scream, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Slowdive, Swervedriver, The Boo Radleys, Teenage Fanclub, The Telescopes, House of Love, and of course, My Bloody Valentine, all called this label home at one time or another. Very few musical ventures ever boasted as flawless, consistent, and vital of a roster as Creation. When you need to namedrop a group to cultivate cred with some hipster douchebag, bring out the big guns with a Creation creation of your choice.

Creation was shoegazing, and visa versa. Creation was as important as Motown and Sun, the only other record labels that actually originated a whole new genre, celebrating it with each and every album they distributed, and offered a community feel between each artist on the label and the fans themselves.

Thankfully, Creation still functions, just not as a label. The Creation website archives a vast array of amazing recordings, documentaries, history lessons, rad schwag, and tasty morsels for people like me who would’ve preferred to come of age during this time period.

Oh, and you can witness some of the madness unfold in this recent documentary about Creation and McGee. McGee’s cockney is a challenge to discern, for me at least:

I bring Creation up today because I discovered not too long ago that I still have the Creation Records sampler Patron Saints of Teenage, originally released in 1994 (and may or may not still be available). I use the verb “discovered” because I never purchased it. It ended up at my house sometime during my senior year of college. I used to throw myriad soirées and theme parties at my house wherein marathon drinking ensued. Big surprise, huh? Anyway, I found it in the living room after cleaning up, and held onto it. Though I love every song on this album, I would certainly give it back if the owner ever claimed it. So, if you:
1) attended a gathering at my house circa Februrary of 2007, give or take a month
2) are missing your copy of Patron Saints of Teenage, and
3) are known by me or my roommates (you can’t invite people to your house you don’t know, you see – so don’t try to swipe a free jam hive) – feel free to contact me about it.

Enjoy some smatterings from Patron Saints of Teenage below. Biff Bang Pow, to connect some dots, was Alan McGee’s band, and consequently, the first Creation band. The Jesus and Mary Chain isn’t included on this particular compilation, but since Creation is the sole force responsible for “Upside Down,” I felt it was appropriate to include.

And for shits and giggles, there’s a “Which Creation Records Band Are You?” quiz, which is hilarious to think about. I love these quizes, especially when someone decides to post their results all over the Internets since they reveal, I guess, something insightful about themselves or whatever. Turns out I’m Slowdive, and hence, discovered a whole new facet of my personality.

MP3 :::
The Pastels – Baby Honey
The Telescopes – High on Fire
Biff Bang Pow! – There Must Be a Better Life
Meat Whiplash – Don’t Slip Up
Revolving Paint Dream – Flowers in the Sky
The Jesus and Mary Chain – Upside Down

As promised earlier this week, here are two classic My Bloody Valentine shows conveniently ZIP archived. These were sent to me by a DT reader and fellow shoegaze ripper. For the sake of comparison, listen to these recordings, then play a track or two from the MBV v2.0 London bootlegs, found here. Virtually no difference, as a “reunion” tour should be (but usually isn’t).

Lookin’ at… lemme see… one month and four days until the Aragon Ballroom in Uptown Chicago is duly leveled. It will be horrible. The National Guard might get called in.

The first bootleg was recorded at the Olympia in Paris in March of 1992. The second may be familiar to bootleg traders. It’s known as Loom, and was recorded in either January, April, or July 1992, depending on who you ask, somewhere in Vancouver. Loom offers the most flawless sound quality found on any given MBV bootleg. You can actually hear the vocals, unlike just about every other bootleg, and perhaps unlike what the live show might be like. I have a couple of highlights you can preview before downloading the entire shows. The noise interlude from Loom is NOT the Holocaust Section. The Holocaust Section always splits the show-ending “You Made Me Realise” in half, and as Bradford Cox described, sounds like “standing in front of a nuclear reactor.” The noise interlude from this bootleg is more the sound of two crustal plates scraping together. Or the sound of doves crying. MBV should release a noise record.

Olympia Theater, Paris – 3.17.92
When You Sleep
Only Shallow
I Only Said
Slow
Nothing Much to Lost
You Never Should
Blown a Wish
Honey Power
Soon
To Here Knows When
Feed Me With Your Kiss
You Made Me Realise / Holocaust Section

Vancouver 1992 – Loom Bootleg
When You Sleep
I Only Said
Only Shallow
Slow
Nothing Much to Lose
[Noise Interlude]
You Never Should
Fee Me With Your Kiss
Soon
To Here Knows When
Honey Power
You Made Me Realise / Holocaust Section

ZIP :::
My Bloody Valentine – Paris @ Olympia, 3.17.92 (Entire Show)
My Bloody Valentine – Loom Bootleg / Vancouver ‘92 (Part One)
My Bloody Valentine – Loom Bootleg / Vancouver ‘92 (Part Two)

MP3 :::
My Bloody Valentine – Only Shallow (Live)
My Bloody Valentine – Slow (Live)
My Bloody Valentine – Noise Interlude (Live)