If you've been following Thurston Moore's career over the last several years, you might have gotten the impression that the Sonic Youth singer/guitarist was beginning to mellow out. Two recent solo efforts-- Trees Outside the Academy and Demolished Thoughts-- were relatively low-wattage affairs that were anchored by acoustic guitars and strings, rather than half-stacks and bashed-up electric guitars.
Since then, Sonic Youth-- which has, for some 30 years, been the central outlet for Moore's screeching rock'n'roll id-- has drifted into an unofficial, maybe-permanent hiatus spurred by the guitarist's break-up with his wife and bandmate, Kim Gordon.
Rather than give his ears a rest, Moore, now 54, opted to start a louder, younger band. Chelsea Light Moving, named for a moving company founded by Phillip Glass that briefly employed his fellow composer, Steve Reich, is a quartet featuring guitarist Keith Wood, of Hush Arbors, and Sunburned Hand of the Man drummer John Moloney. Samara Lubelski, who's released some great, retro-leaning psych-pop solo records, plays bass.
The band's self-titled debut record is the heaviest, most dissonant music that Moore has put together in recent memory, easily out-skronking Sonic Youth's 2009 LP, The Eternal. The album opener, "Heavenmetal", is easy-going, jangling, business-as-usual, with Moore drawling out the cool, neo-hippie refrain, "Be a warrior and love life." But after that, they crank up the volume. The songs, which often stretch up to six-minutes, make frequent nods to metal and hardcore punk, genres that deeply informed Sonic Youth’s earlier records, but that the band has mostly shied away from over the last decade or so.
Moore is the principal songwriter here, but the record's best moments are its most inclusive-- the chugging meltdown that ends "Alighted" or the fuzzy free-for-all that closes "Empires of Time"-- where the guitarist becomes anonymous and melds into the din with his bandmates. The new cast of musicians also helps to inch Moore's compositions away from the sound of his old band. Sonic Youth's drummer, Steve Shelley, played tight, metronomic rhythms. Moloney's rhythms are looser and heavier, buoying some of Chelsea Light's multi-movement zone-out. When they’re hitting hard, they evoke UK blues-prog band Groundhogs plowing through the SST catalog.
The record seems like a conscious attempt for Moore to get back to serious shredding, to move away from introspection and toward the immediate thrill of pummel and screech. Sometimes, Chelsea Light goes too far, stumbling past primal and towards boneheaded. On "Lip" and a cover of Germs' "Communist Eyes", Chelsea Light Moving pays homage to early 80s hardcore and punk. These were musical movements that were defined by freaked-out 18 year-olds and listening to a 54 year-old man echo the snotty tenor of their delivery induces a sort of music-nerd vertigo. Most of the time, though, he just seems like he's trying to get out of the way so that the band can plow back into atonal churn.
Like a lot of Moore's work, the songs on Chelsea Light Moving's debut are a carefully curated mash-up of the singer’s favorite strains of American subculture-- Beat poetry (see "Burroughs"), New York poetry (see "Frank O'Hara Hit"), Texas psych-rock, no wave, hardcore, and so on. And listening to the record, you can get a feeling similar to that of leafing through a really great rock-zine. Sometimes you land on a page that clues you into the mystical, prophetic weirdos of yesteryear. Other times, you get the gross, puking cartoon.
