For fans of My Bloody Valentine, patience isn't so much a virtue as a requirement. This, after all, is a band that took 22 years to follow up its sophomore album, and then did it with a record that — for all its admirers — felt more like a B-sides collection than a fully formed statement.
That album, "m b v," might only have come out in February this year, but the band's Sept. 30 show was billed as the first public airing for "new tracks" from the group. It was a promise that long-time followers might have known to treat with a certain amount of wariness, much like leader Kevin Shield's recent insistence that "the main plan for next year is to make a new record." That said, there was probably a good portion of the sold-out crowd at Tokyo International Forum that kept waiting right until the final rendition of "You Made Me Realise" — which Shields precedes with a mumbled apology ("Sorry about no new tracks, we didn't know about that until we got here") — before they conceded defeat.
By that point in the evening, though, it was unlikely that anyone was going home disappointed. My Bloody Valentine's third Japan trip in the space of a year found the four members in a 5,000-capacity concert hall, with what was probably the finest sound system they had ever (ab)used. Organizer Naohiro Ukawa may have been overstating things when he claimed it would be okay to watch the show without earplugs, but the sonics were a real marvel all the same, remaining crisply defined even when they were cranked up to the kind of volumes you'd expect from a jet engine.