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Live Review
by SashaS
25-6-2002
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| Sonic Youth's Kim 'bass-babe' Gordon |
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Live: Sonic Youth
Shepherds Bush Empire, London
Monday, June 24, 2002
Sonic Youth re-pave ‘yellow brickroad’ to a beguiling eternity
The old quip of Britain and America being separated by the same language is even more applicable to music of late as we appear to have diverged further. While us, Euros, are surpassing ‘last-year’s-new-favourites’ such as Queens of The Stone Age (apart from the Germans who dig everything that is anywhere near metal) with the punkier attitude, more street level sounds of The White Stripes, The Strokes and Liars, even, our transAtlantic cousins appear to be deeper into either that saccharine-punk of Blink 182 or hybrid-rubbish of the Offspring kind…
There is also more melodious rock of Nickelback; The Calling might be an even better (worse?) example. God help America and, then, thank Buddha for Sonic Youth. The band might have been formed over 20 years ago but they’ve lost none of their passion, zeal and love-deal for cacophony. And, they’ve always been anti-genres and remain vital, intriguing and veterans-of-cool. Sonic Youth are still anti-fashion: dressed down, apart Kim Gordon who is sporting a demure, trendy-teacher’s dress, to create a surreal vision when frantically jumping about during ‘Drunk Butterfly’.
Some words: primitive, intel, deconstructed, punk, re-assembled, freak-out… The stage is simply littered with instruments, the basic minimum with band members behaving like anti-stars. There are no long intros, no sermons, no bull****… Just music, rock, its alternative, its alter-ego, its venture; watching Sonic’s gig is like witnessing a review of rock history, enlarged and as mighty as memories… Complexity of ‘Rain On Tin’ is balanced by simple and direct ‘Plastic Sun’, both from the current album ‘Murray Street’. Art-rock, ars amatoria, hypsersensation…
Sonic Youth still do Rock’n’Roll as if spearheading counter culture; their is the textbook case but the twist is that they’ve personally written large chunks of it. This Youth – aged between 40 and 50, with Gordon (bass, guitar, vocal) almost knocking on the half-century mark but still a-babe – show that age doesn’t really matter as long as you obey your own agenda, don’t look back and refuse to hold onto ‘youth’ with surgical instruments. There is infinitely more dignity here than at the Rolling Stones or Aerosmith’s shows.
Impressions: basic, raw, revolting, captivating, experimental, abrasive… SY have fun onstage and sense of humour: a punk-out is introduced as “Our folk-phase”, or performing an a-tonal John Cage’s composition… There are no rules, no plans, it is more intuitive than many an ‘organic’ offering. They play ‘Candle?’ and songs from 1989, they forward to the present disc with ‘The Empty Page’ on their journey into a vista sans frontier. Strong, loud, sensitive, hypnotic, fascinating, way-out, crescendo!
Sonic Youth, unfortunately, don’t trouble charts but – these muthas are as germane as fuqlicious…
*
Sonic Youth play the same venue tonight (25 June) and it is worth arriving early for Liars show.
SashaS
25-6-2002
Sonic Youth’s album ‘Murray Street’ is available now on Geffen/Universal
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