Atoms for Peace recently appeared on “The Daily Show” to play a couple of songs. Thom Yorke and Flea also sat down for an interview, and Jon Stewart posed a common question about side projects: “Within your bands, is there a sense of like, ‘Oh, do you not love us anymore?’” Yorke reported back, “I think it’s all healthy, right? It’s all healthy to free range a bit.” And while Yorke’s current project hews relatively closely to the sonic aims of Radiohead, others depart more sharply from their main gigs. Such is the case with Lee Ranaldo’s latest, Last Night on Earth, a meandering, elastic record—and a side effort that will be lost on most Sonic Youth fans.
A couple of weeks ago, Ranaldo wrote—knowledgably and adoringly—about a documentary capturing a 1972 Grateful Dead concert. (He previously tipped his hat to the group’s ultimate live collection from the same year, Europe 72, here on Pitchfork.) And he acknowledges the Dead’s influence on his current experiment with the Dust: “So I was looking at them as a model for some of the exploratory passages that the Dust and I have recently been attempting. Watching the Dead up on the screen was a real lesson in how it’s done.”
The Dust consists of Sonic Youth drummer, Steve Shelley, as well as avant-garde journeymen Alan Licht and Tim Lüntzel. Together, the quartet has crafted a companion piece to Ranaldo’s record from last year, Between the Times and the Tides. While Last Night on Earth has been billed as more of a cohesive band’s vision, it still suffers from a similar blurry schizophrenia. The Grateful Dead and other psychedelic troupes surely inform Last Night—many tunes clock in at over seven minutes and the closer “Blackt Out”, is just a click under 12—but often Ranaldo calls his past into the fray, forming a conflict. Near the end of the slow burning “Key/Hole”, for instance, he kicks in a raw cacophony and lets the guitar screech. He may not be playing with a screwdriver or attempting to make Michael Gira’s ears bleed, but throughout Night on Earth, Ranaldo takes a step back and realizes that—oh, that’s right—he was in Sonic Youth. And he thrashed. Such coarse epiphanies sound strange in the context of the record’s poppier ambitions.
And he’s moved into unsettled territory in terms of his own forays, to boot. His 1993 collection, Scriptures of the Golden Eternity, boasts track lengths you’d expect from a 1960s acid acolyte but veers toward roughshod 70s clatter. Back then, Ranaldo was knee-deep in stretching out the lab work he began in East Village tenements. Today, an odd blend reigns supreme. Even his jam lines get crossed: The sleek “Lecce, Leaving” recalls Phish’s studio recordings and the jumpy wandering of “Home Chds” Widespread Panic’s. Both songs are hampered by half-baked lyrics and disjointed progressions. “Home Chds” opens with a steady drumbeat that ramps up awkwardly in the mode of a Gov’t Mule number—Ranaldo aiming squarely for the summer amphitheater lawn section. But couple it with his signature, noisy dissonance on the denouement and the result screams jumbled 1990s: the soundtrack to a melee between fans of the factions.
Last Night draws inspiration from the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. “The Rising Tide” is the album’s centerpiece and best example of its apocalyptic tilt; and it’s catchy, too. Ranaldo has a grim outlook on the current state of his environment—the title track is self-explanatory—but the severity and grimness of his outlook are constantly thwarted by a pervasive staleness. Last Night’s disaster themes can even be seen as a more pessimistic counterpart to the Dead’s 1973 album, Wake of the Flood. Unfortunately, Ranaldo’s lyrics don’t have the storytelling deftness that Robert Hunter’s did: On “The Rising Tide”, Ranaldo sings, “In this pure moment let all best intentions expire/ ‘Light up,’ you said, ‘Light up so we can all feel our desires.’” Ranaldo has rightly asserted that jam bands like the Dead have been on the cutting edge of experimentation, as has Sonic Youth. Still, even if the theoretical dots between the two sides’ progressive elements connect, Ranaldo can’t make it jibe here.
There’s no edict that demands a musician, branching out for a solo effort, mimic the sound of his or her steady paycheck source. (Or even to earlier solo material.) Why would an artist, as Yorke alludes, make a solo record if not to branch out? But stumbles like the befuddling Baroque harpsichord of “Late Descent #2” or the lay-up rhymes of “By the Window” prove how difficult deviations can be. The evolving identities of Lee Ranaldo might be a valiant pursuit, but they have made for a problematic tone on Last Night on Earth.
