Review in the Guardian:
http://music.guardian.co.uk/live/sto...155104,00.html
Sonic Youth
ABC, Glasgow
David Peschek
Friday August 24, 2007
The Guardian
As the 1980s drew to a close, rock music had become bloated and empty or, worse still, obsessed with a quest for authenticity, a spurious attempt epitomised by U2's gruesome Rattle and Hum, a foray into ersatz Americana. As corporate rock wheezed out a death rattle, however, a series of records from the underground reimagined what rock might be. Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, released in 1989 and now being played live in its entirety as part of the latest Don't Look Back season, came out at a time when New York's downtown art scene had been decimated by drugs and Aids, and America was groaning under a Republican presidency hostile to the arts. In the record's savage defiance endures the implicit divide between two different Americas.led into one another. They are a good deal older now - Lee Ranaldo's hair is almost totally white - but you couldn't tell from the way they bounce around the stage. As Teen Age Riot ends, Ranaldo, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon create gloriously brutal waves of feedback, rubbing their guitars over the amps, dragging them across the stage. If the Jesus and Mary Chain buried melody under beautiful noise, then Sonic Youth make beautiful melody out of noise. In some songs, they might almost be the New York Dolls. In 'Cross The Breeze, sudden shifts in pace knock the wind out of you and in Total Trash, Moore just punches the strings of his guitar with his fist. The songs' genius is in their fusion of good, old-fashioned riffing with experimental tunings and artful swathes of noise; somehow the sound is both brittle and big.
Despite Daydream Nation's brilliance, the night's most beautiful, affirming moment comes in the encore. Taking off her bass to sing lead on What a Waste from last year's Rather Ripped album, Kim Gordon whirls across the stage, dancing like a teenager, spinning around and around, arms flailing like a dervish. For some, the rock'n'roll ethos is live fast, die young. Yet survival - of productive relationships, of a vision, of a life - is much more radical. Sonic Youth, grow old, grow wise and dream on.