by Matty McPherson (@ghostplanetmatt)
The first time I ever recall hearing a live Sonic Youth performance was 2006. The hearing is an important distinction from seeing, because flip phones really weren’t supposed to capture concert video in 2k6; nor concert audio either, at the Pearl Jam show my mom and fourteen-year old brother had gone to at the time. So whatever I took in was basically a giant blown out compressed audio file. Quite rewarding for an eight year old burgeoning noise enthusiast!
The second time I recall hearing a Sonic Youth live performance would have been in late 2020 with Sonic Death. I’d have owned the deluxe edition of Daydream Nation for eight years practically and never touched the second disc. I was enthralled by the 1984 Ecstatic Peace release that sounded like a video sputtering out of a broken machine. The dream edits, ambient punk dirges, tuning breaks, amongst a series of vicious weeding out processes still marked it as the first SY release I heard that enthralled me and connected to larger ideas of what live SY could and should entail. Only last year, on a third time charm, did I finally see The Year Punk Broke. The experience can feel like a redundant exercise. It may leave you walking away knowing less than you wanted, as much as appreciating why Thurston Moore appeared as Fred Cracklin’ and provided that tribute to Sonny Sharrock on volume 2 of that Space Ghost DVD you’ve owned for about as long as your copy of Daydream Nation.
Months later, I stumbled into someone’s small collection of SY bootlegs, and that further kindled that fire that I had felt from Sonic Death. Somehow I had forgotten to tell Steve Shelley at Gonerfest 19 on Sunday as I bought a reissue tape to send back to a friend. I’d wanted to, as anyone who knows, understands today the Sonic Youth brand and enterprise exists in a form to document live shows, disseminate them to the public, and dutifully carry out what remains of the SY mission. In 2023, it is a small miracle that all of SY is still alive and touring in their own capacities, and for generations that come later they should never leave that opportunity on the table. Even if it means watching Kim Gordon’s sound suffer through a live performance of No Home Record at Big Ears 2022.
Sonic Youth means a lot of things to many people, if you allow it to happen. I’ve accepted letting this band come to me as they are slowly over years, with much reward. The band’s great 00s expansion towards high-culture SYR composer and experimental releases, amongst their unwieldy capacity to jam created strange 21st century pockets that seem destined to meet you at an adult, scholarly level. I love Goodbye 20th Century and last year’s InOutIn, amongst the curious that were there for the taking on 2006’s undersung The Destroyed Room. Yet none of these releases exactly scream “greatest hits” or a proper definitive entry to the band (neither is 2008’s celebrity curated Hits for Squares, an essential Starbucks release with amongst the band’s funniest cover art).
This is what makes the band’s document of near-impending implosion, Live in Brooklyn 2011, perhaps the most giving and gracious accidental greatest-hits and entry point to Sonic Youth they could have asked for. It was given a digital release in 2020, but now is the first of any of those digitals to receive a proper physical treatment in this decade. In 2023, there are numerous noisy rock bands with heavy hitters that slap n’ bang n’ pow, but how many are rendered pigfuck posers by just the first fifteen minutes of this alone? Practically only Sprain and Gilla Band could currently stand toe-to-toe with the feedback and grips with theatrics, and neither have a three decade old catalog they were opting to play for the first time in nearly eight to 26 years at that point. The Brooklyn show indeed errs less towards SY’s 21st century jams and straight into the primordial oozing noise that which many have sprawled out of; it’s a crucial lens that follows the band, but rarely was precisely curated as it was here into a legitimate comprehensive mood of a strain of SY worth renewing. Steve Shelley just happened to tap into something when he curated the setlist days before, as if a hail mary that maybe they could just pull these ancient melodies off; that everyone (plus Mark Ibold) obliged to play them remains a miracle.
The show itself truly reflects an out of time return to resurrect and re-harness Bad Moon Rising era SY into an image of how those crooked paths colored the band’s many albums, no matter how far they pushed beyond the raw noise. Most of this era’s material, with the exception of highway pulp opus “Death Valley 69” (on which Gordon echoes and reverberates loudly as ever), had been left in as chrysalis in ‘85 if not the 20th century; even “Kill Yr Idols” from Confusion had disappeared. Yet, their I-Beam performance in San Francisco I revisited on tape revealed just how primo this urgency and kinetic noise mustered; as does the Smart Bar ‘85 show that indicates why a return to this material felt vital even at the twilight.
Rechanneling pre-SST SY with years of a locked-in, aged relationship sees a majesty and paranoia to “Brave Men Run (In My Family),” or Thurston Moore’s uncanny jester-like glee on “Kill Yr Idols”. With only two nights of rehearsal under their back bringing out “these fuckers,” the quartet ends up concocting an unwieldly performance that’d see them out through their South American festival detente. Yes, the quality is amongst the strongest, even rivaling the studio recordings themselves just for how lovingly varied and sprawling things can become, even if a listen back can be bittersweet. Together though, these rarities do play in perfect sync with long time grandstanding material. “Eric’s Trip” and “Tom Violence” feel akin to old joys further shading the colors of “Ghost Bitch” and “Kotton Krown” and drawing parallels between that energy that laid dormant. Even The Eternal’s three late bloomers and Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star’s “Starfield Road” all seem ascended to a degree that this curation is making salient by the time “I Love Her All the Time” comes crashing through. There’s a lesson to be taken away from the raw finesse of how to pace and stage a performance.
That is made abundantly clear within their two encores. Both Gordon and Moore are given their own respective meditations in the form of “Flower” and “Psychic Hearts”; cuts that go deep and leave much to think about a dozen years on about words not said and tensions. They’re each backed by “Sugar Kane” and “Inhuman,” two radically different approaches to noise jams from deep around the catalog. “Sugar Kane” immediately reminded me of how much Dirty’s trojan-horse charm benefitted being able to twist itself into a knotting, pummeling bombardment in the back half; it feels like they could go on forever, another thirty years in sight. Then, “Inhuman” dives back thirty years as if to entirely eradicate that into what must’ve been felt at those art galleries in ‘81 when the future was not so certain. It’s a sobering, powerful final quarter of the double format release.
The only criticism that could be leveraged against the release now completely sold out for that matter. It’s been unusually rewarding on cassette, paced to revisit in chunks, regardless of Side C featuring a long bout of silent tape as a result of pacing, but this is complete pedantic minutiae though. Didn’t you know there’s a rattlesnake head that’s gonna come from over the river, spray LSD on our heads like angel dust, take us to 2012, where we’ll all become women?! At least that’s what Moore told that audience, and I’m more than obliged to accept that one day, they’ll come back and take us to that fabled version of 2012, but for now, the mission continues. SY’s tenacity to once more provide a sleight from the archival afterlife only renews the vigor of why their music will continue to reverberate.