"I want to tour with Phish because the kind of music we make is more in tune with their aesthetic," said Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore in 1998. "We deserve each other." Moore might've been kidding, but he was onto something. If "jam band" means what Wikipedia says-- "extended musical improvisation over rhythmic grooves and chord patterns"-- then it's not a stretch to say Sonic Youth belong to a lineage of underground jam bands. Start with the guitar forays of Velvet Underground and Television, move through the krautrock of Can and Faust, then dive into droners Spacemen 3 and Acid Mothers Temple and feedback hounds Bardo Pond and Dead Meadow. All are more inclined toward punk edge and avant-garde dissonance than Phish, of course. But it's undeniable that they all like to jam.
If you buy this idea even a little, you'll probably dig Chris Forsyth's Paranoid Cat. It begins with a title track that's essentially 21 minutes of jamming, albeit a thoughtful, well-planned kind. Forsyth has always put care into even the most chaotic music by his other band, the unclassifiable Peeesseye, and he maintains that approach here. Interlocking his roaming guitar with the pedal steel of Marc Orleans and piano of Hans Chew, Forsyth unfurls the winding three-part opener in ways that evoke all the acts mentioned above. But there's also a folk twang that brings to mind early-1970s Neil Young, and a symphonic repetition that recalls Glenn Branca's Lesson No. 1. Imagine Branca's ensemble covering "Down by the River", and you have some idea of this track's particular magic.
The rest of Paranoid Cat maintains that vibe pretty well. "New Pharmacist Boogie" is garage rock with the drums erased, evoking a beat-less take on jammy Velvet Underground tracks like "Booker T." and "Melody Laughter". Closer "Anniversary Day" starts out like Galaxie 500 covering "Heroin", then floats into more Young-style pastoral drift. But don't let all these comparisons mislead you-- Paranoid Cat is by no means derivative. It's more like historical musical commentary, an amalgam of time-tested sounds that adds new insights to what it echoes. Besides, even if Paranoid Cat belongs to some underground jam-band canon, it's rather unparalleled today. Jim O'Rourke's longer-form pieces swim in the same water; some of what MV & EE do when chasing Neil Young comes close; and Bardo Pond are still valiantly taking hits off of this kind of loose expansion. But as tempting as it is to keep searching for influences in Paranoid Cat's stretched-out essays, zoning out to its thoughtful strains is even more fun.
