I was just picking up my ticket and earplugs when Patti Smith was ushered through the crowd in front of me. I would have said hello, but the last time I spoke to her she threw a plate of sandwiches at me after I described her then-boyfriend, Allen Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult, as a ‘certifiable midget’. This was an uncommonly rude remark, I now realise, though I will say in nervous mitigation that at the time I’d recently seen BOC at Hammersmith Odeon and been struck by the thought that if it finally went tits up for the band they would all be assured of futures of some consequence as those wee clowns in the circus who are forever dashing hither, and amusingly yon, at high speed, running between the legs of men on stilts and throwing buckets of water over the crowd. Meanwhile, I’m now wondering what’s happening on stage, from which vicinity I can hear something that sounds like someone with no teeth to speak of attempting to bark like a dog. It turns out to be tonight’s support, Graham Coxon, who is gamely battling the audience’s growing anticipation for My Bloody Valentine. In the bar, I speak to several hardened MBV veterans who are almost beside themselves with excitement, and simultaneously apprehensive. Would the band live up to their vaulted expectations, their recollections of those shows 20 years ago that remain vivid in their memory? A chap named Ian, who had last seen them at Brixton Academy on the Rollercoaster tour, is particularly anxious. Back in the day, he’d been such a Valentines fan that when they split, he actually stopped going to gigs, and recently has only been to see Alicia Keys, his wife being a fan. She didn’t want to come tonight, so he’s brought his mate Kevin, who’s heard a lot from Ian about how brilliant MBV at one time were that even he’s worried about whether they can possibly match their own reputation. They do, of course, as John Mulvey vividly described in his Wild Mercury blog on www.uncut.co.uk. I saw the band several times back whenever, and they were never as great then as they are tonight when at times they sound like nothing else I’ve ever heard. As John pointed out, what’s happened in many ways is that technology’s caught up with them and we can now share more clearly Kevin Shields’ vision of what he always wanted them to sound like. The volume, as promised is extraordinary, but it’s not just the noise that blows me away – it’s the sheer unbelievable intensity, the utter density, of the sound, the layered sheets of guitars and sequencers, the cavernous rumblings of the rhythm section – Debbie Gould playing bass like Joe Strummer used to play rhythm guitar, which is to say with an absolute relentlessness, Colm O’Closoig’s drumming the colossal rhythmic ballast holding firm at the centre of the deafening hum. The by-now celebrated final 25 minutes of “You Made Me Realise” is truly astonishing – Neil Young’s similar guitar apocalypse on “Hidden Path”, as played a few months ago on his recent tour, merely hinting at this jaw-dropping meltdown, My Bloody Valentine here speaking to us in a musical language that is wholly their own. I hope Patti enjoyed it as much as I did.

One of the weirder and more heartening musical shifts of the past few years has been the way post-rockers have moved into looser, hairier, trad rock terrain. I’m thinking of records like Jim O’Rourke’s southern-tinged “Insignificance”, perhaps (Incidentally, O’Rourke has broken his musical exile, after a fashion, with something called Osorezan; more on that soon), as well as that palpable move towards heavy jams and psych by any number of college rock types in the wake of Stephen Malkmus. And so on. To these you can now add Dave Brylawski and Steve Popson, who first made a subterranean name for themselves in the ‘90s as part of the post-hardcore/math-rock/genre-friendly grouping known as Polvo. Polvo were venerated by a certain type of indie fan for their complexity, their precision, and a sort of forceful virtuosity. Also, in retrospect, they rocked a fair bit harder than most of their contemporaries. Which explains, I guess, Brylawski and Popson’s newish venture, Black Taj. The band seem to have been around a while (this seems to be their second album), and apparently Polvo are currently touring again. But “Beyonder” is our first encounter with this excellent group, and a record which has been heavily played here in the office, often close to that Endless Boogie record I keep going on about. Black Taj don’t choogle like Endless Boogie; at times, on the likes of “Damascus”, they can be dreamily ponderous, with historically pungent lyrical references to “Spanish castles” and such. They can, occasionally, boogie superbly, though. When “Damascus” ends, it’s followed by a heads-down riff which gradually fades in. This is “Spacewash”, somewhere between Status Quo and Hawkwind (and also, we’ve just collectively sussed, reminiscent of the “Feel Good Hit Of The Summer” reprise at the end of Queens Of The Stone Age’s “Rated R”), which frustratingly fades out again pretty fast. And then “Only For A Moment”, reeking of ZZ Top’s “Tres Hombres”, and “LA Shift”, with that fuzzy low-end lurch so often promised by Dead Meadow, but rarely delivered. I guess post-rock was always a refuge for technically-minded musicians who were, thanks to the (at the time useful) strictures of hardcore, intensely wary of soloing and anything which could be termed as self-indulgence, and who consequently sometimes came across as rather uptight and chill. “Beyonder”, though, is one of those records that feels like a great warm liberation, a celebration of the pleasures of two guitars tracing intricate paths around each other – check out the mighty “Fresh Air Traverse” which I linked a few weeks ago - with a gusto. Somehow, heroically, Brylawski and his cohorts have managed to keep the meticulous spirit of adventure which invigorated their old music, and aligned it to an older, wilder tradition. Very good record.

“Class of ’88 reunion,” announces Sonic Boom. He has just played “Transparent Radiation” and is about to launch – launch may not be the right word, exactly; slope, perhaps? – into an excellent “When Tomorrow Hits”. In front of me, someone is wearing a “Goo” t-shirt. On the way to the Roundhouse, someone randomly proffered an open bottle of amyl. Only Sonic Boom’s haircut appears to have changed, slightly, in the intervening 20 years. Full review over at Wild Mercury Sound, folks.

“Class of ’88 reunion,” announces Sonic Boom. He has just played “Transparent Radiation” and is about to launch – launch may not be the right word, exactly; slope, perhaps? – into an excellent “When Tomorrow Hits”. In front of me, someone is wearing a “Goo” t-shirt. On the way to the Roundhouse, someone randomly proffered an open bottle of amyl. Only Sonic Boom’s haircut appears to have changed, slightly, in the intervening 20 years. I’m pathologically wary of nostalgia, but there is something in the air tonight which gets to me. Perhaps it’s the most coherent set I’ve seen involving Sonic Boom for the best part of 20 years. More likely, it’s the prospect of My Bloody Valentine, chipped out of aspic (along with their merchandise), for a poignant and unbelievably powerful reunion, bringing back not just memories, but, at the height of the “You Made Me Realise” holocaust especially, physical experiences that I’ve rarely had since, well, 1992. But we’ll get to that later. First, they look uncannily as they left us. Kevin Shields, as the one member of the band I’ve spotted this century, seems to have grown younger in preparation for these shows. And here they are, beginning with “Only Shallow”, entirely diffident to the extraordinary noise they’re making. A few things cross my mind. First, and critically, it’s an accepted fact that My Bloody Valentine are one of the most influential bands of their generation. But how much do their myriad followers actually sound like them? On this evidence, it’s clear: not that much. It’s not just the unparsable sounds coming out of Shields and Bilinda Butcher’s guitars, or the way they interact with the flutter of sequencers. No, it’s the sheer intense forcefulness of the music. I’m reminded, belatedly, that the most crucial influence on them in the late ‘80s wasn’t, as is usually claimed, the Jesus & Mary Chain, but was in fact Dinosaur Jr. The pace here, especially in “Feed Me With Your Kiss” and “Nothing Much To Lose”, is obliteratingly close to hardcore. And even on the legendarily vague “To Here Knows When”, Colm O’Ciosoig’s drumming is vigorous and constant, a firm anchor to all the nebulous instability spinning around it. Was it always quite like this? It’s hard to remember precisely, but of the half-dozen or so Valentines shows I saw between ’87 and ’92, one of my most resilient memories is of their unpredictability. There was one particular show at Oxford Poly, as it was then, which may have been the first night of the “Isn’t Anything” tour, and which was remarkable for their complete inability to get through an entire track without screwing up. If memory serves, “Lose My Breath” was the only song that emerged more or less intact. Bilinda Butcher spent the best part of an hour looking unfathomably sheepish, and promised to come back for another gig. As far as I remember, they never did. There’s a brief false start to “When You Sleep” tonight, but otherwise, the reinvigorated MBV now seem to have an unusual kind of slickness to them. Other bands might not have quite caught up with them, but perhaps technology has. Or perhaps, for all their talk, other bands don’t want to catch up with MBV, are not confident enough that their audiences will withstand such extreme volumes and frequencies. This, clearly, is not a problem for Kevin Shields. There are free earplugs available at the Roundhouse, and signs on the walls which actually advise you to wear them, which I do. My wife is being tougher, until the sixth tune, when she asks me what they’re playing. I tell her to put her plugs in; she sticks her fingers in her ears and immediately locates the piercing banshee riff of “I Only Said”, hitherto obscured by the thunderstorm of noise. Weirdly, then, wearing earplugs – not something I usually do – actually enhances the gig. That way, you can hear Shields’ strafing, Rother-esque riffs in “Slow”, identify that, yes, the implacable Butcher is just about singing throughout. And, most importantly you can withstand the holocaust. The standard comparison for the 25-minute whiteout section of “You Made Me Realise” is to a plane taking off: on the Drowned In Sound messageboard, someone discovered they were playing close to 130 decibels – “the equivalent of "Military jet aircraft take-off from aircraft carrier with afterburner at 50 feet,” apparently. I am, embarrassingly, in the lavatories when this begins, and the way the cubicle shakes makes me understand, indeed, why you're not allowed to use toilets on planes during take-off. When I get back into the venue, a good proportion of the audience already have their fingers in their ears. The music, generally, seems to be hitting me in the knees, and my trouserlegs are palpably flapping. I’m generally sceptical of the usefulness of extreme volume: I wrote a long and moderately grumpy live review of Techno Animal for The Wire some years back, suggesting that loudness was a macho stunt, more or less. What strikes me now, facile though it may sound, is that loudness works if you like what is being played loud (I didn’t much, when it came to Techno Animal). My Bloody Valentine’s strategy seems predicated on making music hit your entire body: it’s up to you, the listener, to decide whether you want the assault to be as total on your ears, or whether you choose to mediate it with earplugs. I’m glad I did. My ears were still buzzing when I came out, but I don’t think the long-term disintegration of my hearing was palpably accelerated by Saturday’s gig. What was enhanced was a renewed sense of the value of My Bloody Valentine. How strange, how remarkable, that one of the most important bands of my formative years should turn out even better than I remembered them to be. No new songs, of course. But how was it for you? Let me know. . .