My Bloody Valentine, Brixton Electric, London

All day prior to My Bloody Valentine’s surprise warm up gig at the Brixton Electric, it seems everyone who had snapped up tickets had taken to Twitter to post pictures of earplugs. Cheap foam ones, expensive custom fitted ones, the site was awash with visual representation of all manner of devices, each accompanied by a message along the lines of ‘I’m going to need these tonight #mbv’.

The volume of My Bloody Valentine gigs is now somewhat legendary - back in 1992 during the ‘Rollercoaster’ tour the band played so loud that the sound waves would cause pint glasses to fly out of punters’ hands, and at their Camden Roundhouse gigs in 2008 the sonic onslaught that is ‘You Made Me Realise’ was routinely punctuated by people being physically sick. It’s a curious position for a band who, on record at least, are hardly Motörhead, but live it is as the band believe the melody of their songs is made only more beautiful by being obfuscated in 130 db.

As it transpires it is not the loudness of the gig that is the main talking point afterwards, rather it is the fact that the band open with the first new My Bloody Valentine track in over twenty years and immediately afterwards Kevin Shields announces from the stage that their new album will be released in ‘2-3 days’. Whether he was being entirely serious we will know shortly, although given that he previously promised it would be released at the end of December 2012, I for one won’t be holding my breath. However the new song (which we later learn from a purloined set list is called, perhaps tellingly, ‘Rough Song’) is fairly underwhelming. Featuring wah-wah guitar and a drumbeat that can only be described as ‘baggy’, it sounded curiously dated, like the kind of 12’ indie dance remix that was mandatory for bands to release in the aftermath of ‘Madchester’.

It is the only new track we hear tonight, although the sound is so poor that at times it is only halfway through the song that we recognise what the band are actually playing. Bilinda’s and Kevin’s vocals are never particularly prominent in the mix but they are pretty much inaudible for the majority of the evening. Guitar effects seem to cut in and out, seemingly at random, and as the set progresses Kevin gets more and more frustrated, eventually truncating a particularly poor ‘To Here Knows When’ by saying ‘It sounds like we are playing in a giant tunnel’.

Things improve with their second attempt at the song, and a majestic ‘Soon’ finally gets the fairly subdued audience (which features members of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr and Primal Scream) moving. They finish, as always, with ‘You Made Me Realise’ but the ‘holocaust’ section is timed at a relatively sedate 4 minutes, and not the 20 minute assault of old.

Perhaps it is unfair to judge My Bloody Valentine on the basis of a ‘warm up’ gig. After all, isn’t one of the purposes of such affairs to iron out any kinks in a band’s stage show. As they embark on a series of dates in Korea, Japan and Australia it would be a safe bet that when they return to the UK in March they will be back to their imperious best. By then they may even have released a new album. Don’t chuck away those earplugs yet.