Friday, October 3, 2008

Thurston Moore, Little Claw and the tiniest bit of Eat Skull

Hey, look it's my 100th post! So in the spirit of having written so fucking many things that no one reads, here's a concert review of Thurston Moore performing his Psychic Hearts in total with a couple of kicking baby bands in tow.

Thurston Moore + Little Claw + Eat Skull17 September 2008: Pearl Street — Northampton, MA

Thurston Moore revisits his 1995 solo album Psychic Hearts with Steve Shelley, Chris Brokaw, and a bass player called Mutilator along for the ride.

by Jennifer Kelly

"Where were you in 1995?” Thurston Moore asks the crowd, about halfway through his set. The guy he points to first is flummoxed. He was seven, as it turns out, and probably doesn’t want to admit spending the whole year playing with Transformers. Another, further to the back, says he learned to masturbate that year. “I’d say give this guy a hand, but… “ Moore cracks, then adds: “In 1995, I was living in New York and deeply in love with my wife, and we had a one-year-old baby… that was about it.”

Actually, that’s not quite it. In 1995, Moore also released Psychic Hearts, a one-off collaboration with Steve Shelley and Tim Foljahn that explored connections between mainstream rock and art, angular noise, and liquid lyricism. Like many proper Sonic Youth albums, it was rife with cultural allusions, name-checking Patti Smith and Yoko Ono, Stephen Tyler and Madonna, while slipping in some Nirvana-style whisper to a scream dynamics alongside a long quotation from the Rolling Stone’s “Moonlight Mile”. It was built on innovative, oddly tuned guitar riffs, feedback, and angular rhythms… and yet it was oddly accessible to rock ‘n’ roll ears.

Tonight, Moore, Shelley, and new recruits Chris Brokaw and Mutilator, are to play all of Psychic Hearts, mostly, but not quite in the order of the record.


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