Pop Reviews : Getting an Earful From My Bloody Valentine

There’s noise--as in “Isn’t that an interesting . . . ?” And there’s noise --as in “Turn down that gol-darn . . . .” The English quartet My Bloody Valentine showed where the twain meet Tuesday at the Roxy.

Earplugs marked the dividing line. With them, the show leaned to the former, as enticing vocal melodies and instrumental hooks held sway. Without them, it was an earsplitting but warmly enveloping wash of sound. Either way it was an impressive display of decibels, something akin to hearing a really great pop band playing in a machine shop, with all the scraping and squealing metal orchestrated as part of the songs.

Emphasizing material from the recent “Loveless” album, MBV related, in varying degrees, to the art-of-noise experiments of such predecessors as the Jesus and Mary Chain, Sonic Youth, the Cocteau Twins and Brain Eno. But there was nothing to compare it to when during the final song the band dived, inevitably, into a several-minute long avalanche of pure, chaotic, atonal noise that had many in the crowd sticking fingers in ears. It was as exhilarating as it was painful.

Painful in a different though not unpleasant way was anguished opening band Babes in Toyland, a Minneapolis female trio led by singer-guitarist Kat Bjeland, a one-time bandmate of Courtney Love of L.A.’s Hole. In fact, sharing as they do untamed blond hair, untamed post-punk rock and untamed anger, Bjeland and Love would be well-cast as the Doublemint Twins from Hell.