Pretty much everything was going to pale in comparison to last week's My Bloody Valentine show. (On the cab ride back from the WaMu Theater the night of MBV, "Imagine" came on the radio, and it just sounded so silly and slight in comparison.) And not just music—for at least a day or two afterward, my perception of time itself felt a bit off (at least that was my excuse for being late to everything this week), like I was still in that 18 minutes of atom-splitting noise, like that time was looping still, sustaining longer than the days after, dwarfing them. It was hard to feel too impressed by any shows in the week since, although it was no fault of theirs.

I'm still totally, head-over-heels smitten with Vivian Girls, who played Neumos on Thursday. It didn't really matter that the vocals were so low in the mix that night (maybe that was just at the very foot of the stage?) or that the band's set was too short and didn't include a cover of Wavves' "So Bored" (really wanted to see that), because their songs are just irresistibly dreamy and sweet and ebullient. They played one or two new songs from a forthcoming album (!), remarkable for running well over the 3:30 minute mark—they're not going prog or anything, but still, relatively epic. They ran offstage, sometimes while still playing their instruments, to grab a drink in the backstage area (god, touring bands must think Seattle is fucking retarded; thanks, WSLCB). They closed their set with their big instrument-switch-up drone jam. Of course, as drone jams go, I've heard bigger.

Caught Constant Lovers live for the first time on Friday, opening for the always-impressive Sleepy Eyes of Death. Constant Lovers frontman Joel Cuplin has maybe picked up a couple things from his other bands' frontmen, Jeff Suffering and Spencer Moody, namely the former's fire-and-brimstone gesturing (lots of spooky, trembling hands) and the latter's wicked howling. The band opened and closed their set with all four members pounding on percussion, and in between they let loose a lot of searing guitar feedback and Cuplin's brooding, biblically inspired lyrics (references to jawbones and asses, eyes for eyes, etc.).

Finally, saw Secret Mommy in a basement on Saturday. The formerly one-man laptop band of Andy Dixon performed as a quintet this time, performing songs off of recent album Plays, a typically glitchy production whose sample sources were notably all acoustic rather than electronic, with live glockenspiel, woodwinds, electric guitar, and voice, as well as Dixon's usual software mangling. It was a fine treatment for the material, equal parts jazzy orchestration and giddy electronic bounce, and it was so intimate—at a couple points, all the instrumentation fell away to leave the band singing harmonies in a cappella—and so opposite of the stadium rocket-launch of MBV, that I was able to reset my head and fully feel it. They should come back and do Plays for a larger room sometime.