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I knew it was going to be loud.  I think I knew it intuitively just from the clues hidden in the mix of their timeless album Loveless.  I definitely knew it before I heard people in the parking lot spreading apocryphal stories about audience lawsuits over hearing loss.

So before we arrived at the Palladium Ballroom to see My Bloody Valentine on their 2009 reunion tour, I decided to be a good friend and buy a big jug of earplugs for my group of audiophiles in case they forgot to bring any.  Sure enough they did.

It turns out that it didn’t matter because as we walked through the gate, the ushers handed each and every person their own individually packaged set of earplugs.  That’s how you know a band is going to be loud—when the venue makes a special effort to put a set of plugs in every concertgoer’s hand before the show.  I’m used to seeing a jar of cheap plugs at the bar, but this was a clearly a very different animal.

It was ungodly loud.  Perhaps the loudest thing I had ever experienced.  My dad was an airline mechanic and on Bring Your Son to Work Day I got to experience just how loud a jet engine is.  My Bloody Valentine was louder.

During their closer, an extended rendition of “You Made Me Realize”, the band chose a single chord and extended it for 17 minutes (I know because the person in front of me was recording it and had a timer on the LCD screen).  There were people wearing earplugs still trying with all their might to cover their ears with their hands.  There were people doubled over in pain.  Frankly, I couldn’t believe the sound system at the venue didn’t explode.

The experience alone made the show worthwhile, not to mention getting the chance to see one of my all-time favorite bands.  But there were a few things about the show that made me feel cheated.  If you see MBV play live, you’ll be sad to see that there is no synthesizer player.  All those great synth hooks are pre-recorded to a tape.  Without those melodies, you are pretty much left with two people playing rhythm guitar, a bass player, and a drummer.

Also, the vocals were buried to the point that sometimes I questioned whether or not anyone was actually singing (You might also wonder that from the decidedly un-engaging stage presence of the seminal shoe-gazers who seemed to exchange staring at the floor for hiding behind the microphone). In the world of live sound it’s almost cheating to hide the vocals that way—it is very easy to make a band loud if you don’t have to worry about feedback (or even hearing the vocals for that matter).

But to a certain extent that’s what Loveless sounds like.  It is a lush and thick wash of guitars with soaring synth lines against buried vocals and drums.  All this contributes to a very unique sonic texture that has extremely high average loudness, but subconsciously forces the listener to turn up the volume.

Prince famously said that the most important part of a mix is the “boom and the slap” (meaning the kick and snare).  Well, in Loveless, the drums are mixed so far back into the track that at normal listening levels they are barely noticeable.  In order to get the drums to a listenable level, the listener is forced to crank up the whole track.  By the time you get the drums to where you want to hear them, the unwavering assault of distorted electric guitars is screamingly loud.

Since I cut my teeth in the music world as a drummer, the drums are what I notice.  But many people site the same experience by trying to bring the vocals to a listenable level as well.  They pose the same problem, although to me the problem of audibility in the vocals is not remedied by additional volume since they are so legato, washed in reverb, and poorly enunciated.  But then again, lyrical content and vocal execution weren’t the primary objectives.  The point was to be loud.

For the most part, the synth hooks and even the snare drum cut by frequency content rather than relative volume in the mix.  They occupy higher registers sailing over the bed of guitars.

From a mastering standpoint, the drums and vocals have to be mixed this way so that they become part of the texture. If the transient content of the drums were any louder, the track would pump wildly as the compressor keyed on each drum hit.  Similarly, the vocals couldn’t stand out like most lead vocals do or else the mastering compressor would key on it instead as well.  The overall sound is accomplished by creating a bed that has very little fluctuation in average loudness despite any changes that might occur.

Of course I’m sure that none of this was explicitly sought after.  Like most indie bands, MBV probably tucked the vocals in because they didn’t like the sound of their own voice.  But nevertheless, the end is achieved masterfully, regardless of the means or the motivation.

I love the way Loveless sounds, but I will be the first to say that that record sounds terrible if it isn’t cranked way up.  The mix really only sounds reasonable if the volume is up, but that’s all right for pretty much anybody who wants to listen to that record anyway.