SONIC YOUTH
Live In Brooklyn 2011 (Silver Current)
“We decided to go, like, super deep,” laughs Thurston Moore. The audience at what turned out to be Sonic Youth’s final US show – captured on Live In Brooklyn 2011 – in the city that made them, were duly treated to a setlist that dredged up the sturm und drang of their earliest years, including Kill Yr Idols and the howl into the abyss that is Inhuman, and – aside from three tracks from 2009’s studio swansong The Eternal – featured nothing released after 1995.
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Live In Brooklyn 2011 is, from start to finish, a monument to an utterly vital band who effortlessly straddled the distinct, often distant spheres of rock‘n’roll and the avant garde. Starfield Road in particular underlines their singular ability to conjure order from chaos (and vice versa), while Drunken Butterfly brings back the sheer visceral thrill of first discovering that music could possibly sound like THIS.
Yet the listening experience is also bittersweet. Kotton Krown and I Love Her All The Time – both of which pass for ballads in the Youniverse – sound different when you know that the marriage of alt-rock power couple Moore and Kim Gordon was about to implode (and the band with it). Death Valley ‘69, casually dropped second, demonstrates that they’d lost none of their formidable live power over the years, and the new songs – especially Sacred Trickster and Calming The Snake – prove that they still had plenty more to give.
words BEN WOOLHEAD
