Thursday, July 29, 2004
Sonic Youth in Concert
I caught Sonic Youth in concert at the Vic in Chicago Thursday night, my first time seeing them live. They were amazing!
Opening act Hair Police were a boring noise band on the surface, but with their Fuck You!s to the audience and their silly personas they were clearly doing some kind of art school performance art. I was embarassed for the few members of the audience who rose to the bait. Next up were a slightly better mediocrity named Wolf Eyes who I was told "had some buzz." Though the band has some noise potential, their performance was absolutely lousy. They played for about 15 minutes (Hair Police had played barely more), so most of the time from 8 o'clock to a few minutes after 10 when Sonic Youth took stage was spent waiting, so I was actually in a foul, angry mood when they started.
They were immediately so good, I instantly forgave them for foisting such bad bands on us and making us wait 45 minutes more before they went on. (They went on to play until a few minutes before midnight, including two encores.) I don't know their catalog as well as I should, but according to some people who wrote in to the SY message board (and comparing it to what I remember), their setlist looked something like this (album title abbreviations in brackets):
I Love You Golden Blue [SN]
Stones [SN]
Pattern Recognition [SN]
Unmade Bed [MS]
Skip Tracer [WM]
Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream [SN]
White Cross [S]
New Hampshire [SN]
Paper Cup Exit [SN]
Bull in the Heather [EJTANS]
Dude Ranch Nurse [SN]
Burning Spear [?]
(1st encore) Rain On Tin [MS]
Pacific Coast Highway [S]
(2nd encore) Sugar Kane [D]
(I think there was actually more, though.) I've always liked the Sonic Youth sound, but my enthusiasm for their albums has waxed and waned. Their new album (Sonic Nurse) is excellent, and I like the previous album (Murray Street) quite a bit. Clearly, Jim O'Rourke has reenergized the band. He was on fire at the concert, absolutely attacking his guitar. Everything about Sonic Youth came together for me at this revelatory show--the beat influence, the improv, the experimentation, the Branca stuff (which I am now very motivated to hear). It's all served to make this band stronger and more cohesive musically and, above all, masters of rock texture. (At times I closed my eyes and just lost myself in the sound, a feeling that took me back to the best rock concerts I've ever attended.) With four guitarists on stage, I spent a lot of the time trying to pick out the individual voices. At least once during the show, they lined up for a unified frontal assault on the audience that utterly blew me away.
Kim Gordon acted, basically, as the lead of this awesome band, which was only appropriate, as her material dominates the new album. At one point, teasingly thanking us for coming out to the concert rather than staying home to listen to Kerry's convention speech, Thurston referred to Bush as fuckface (cheer!), a bit later saying, "As a wise man once said, 'Women of the world, take over,'" a sly reference to a Jim O'Rourke song from Eureka. It also seemed like an acknowledgement of Kim's excellent front-woman skills. I was surprised how sexy (and sexual) Kim and Thurston were on stage. Thurston rubbed his guitar all over his body at one point like it was some strange sextoy, licking it, straddling it. It'd be stupid if most people tried that kind of over-the-top cockrock stuff, but it worked Thursday because they had the guitar chops (and vocals, not to mention drumming) to back it all up. I've heard/read that Sonic Youth hasn't been this good in years, so I feel lucky to have seen the band at their very best. I'm almost afraid to see them again, out of fear that they could never again live up to this concert.
