Thurston Moore is still sonic and still youthful
At age 49, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore may technically no longer be a youngster (though he remains awfully, unnervingly youthful), but he’s certainly still sonic - with or without an electric guitar. Upon taking the Remis Auditorium stage at the Museum of Fine Arts Thursday night with his four-piece band, which he cheekily announced as “The Legion of the Untamed Ox,” Moore demonstrated just how much noise a couple of plugged-in acoustic guitars could make - with the correct adjustments of volume and attitude, of course.
The blissful racket, which came courtesy of the MFA’s free annual “College Night” event, proved every bit as resonant and powerful as Moore and Co.’s electric encore. During a transportive 60-minute set, the lanky Sonic Youth singer-guitarist - who founded his New York art-punk outfit years before most of the “College Night” audience had even been born - not only proved how effortlessly cathartic a crunching rock riff can still be, but also why Sonic Youth has endured and outlasted so many of the so-called punk bands that have come in its wake.
Although Moore didn’t play any Sonic Youth numbers, instead concentrating strictly on material from the new “Trees Outside the Academy,” his first solo album in a dozen years, and its predecessor, 1995’s “Psychic Hearts,” SY’s unmistakable DNA coursed through new selections such as “The Shape Is in a Trance” and the exhilarating open-road-with-detours instrumental “Off Work.”
Besides Moore’s battery of low-slung chord changes and cool, conversational drawl, no doubt the familiar rumble and jagged splendor had to do with another SY member, drummer Steve Shelley, manning the kit. Then there was subtly superb second guitarist Chris Brokaw, a Boston underground rock mainstay whose own bands (Come, Codeine) seemed more than a little familiar with the SY playbook.
Samara Lubelski’s icy violin intro opened “Frozen GTR” before the band quickly thawed out the tune with a methodical, warm-blooded groove, with Brokaw greasing and goosing it along with slide guitar and Moore strumming the song to hotter temperatures. “Silver{gt}Blue” was all beautiful breaks and bridges, humming momentum, and mood mutations. Moore and Shelley closed out the evening as a duo with a tight, tense, exquisitely primal reading of “Psychic Hearts,” an anthem of alienation from the album of the same name.
Singer-guitarist Christina Carter opened with a short, reverb-drenched solo set of sometimes haunting, sometimes harrowing, and mostly inscrutable avant-folk.
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