There are Sonic Youth guitars that sound like airplanes about to jet off into the sky. There are Sonic Youth guitars that sound like choir bells, chiming on the offbeat. There are lunar mission-control guitars and underwater-sea anemone guitars and rootsy Neil-Young-solos guitars and static-clinged-hump-the-amplifier-crescendo guitars that make your heart race.
Any Sonic Youth concert is more about ideas than feeling — and the band is very much constructed that way. Kim Gordon swaying her hips in a body-hugging silver lamé mini-dress. Thurston Moore lurching in the air, forever young. Lee Ranaldo politely thanking the crowd, the band’s most consummate professional. Steve Shelley — the Stewart Copeland of indie rock — subtly centering the band with the flicker of drums. Bassist Mark Ibold, with his back turned to the audience, working out a rhythm.
Playing almost the entirety of their slip-through-your-fingers new album, The Eternal, Sonic Youth are as New York-arty as ever. After a brief set by the Ecstatic Peace-signed The Entrance Band (total Americana with garage rock-influenced freak-outs), the band took stage at 9:05pm, walking onto the room that has hosted many of their idols, namely Neil Young. Beginning with the murky and dissonant “She Is Not Alone” (off the band’s first self-titled 1981 EP), the band made their oddly tuned guitars sound like the twang of rubber bands popping off against your cousin’s knee. Moore crouched down over the amplifier, sliding his guitar over the surface until falling down on the stage and rubbing his body over his instrument. Huge obelisk-like lighting fixtures were mounted behind the band, making the show feel like a live presentation from Stonehenge.
Next, “Sacred Trickster,” The Eternal’s barely two minute single in which Gordon muses stupidly, “I wish I could be, music on a tree.” Intoning her words through a deep husk, she made all those vapid free-verse musings sound like dark confessions, the kind of talk you have while feeling stoned and very sincere.
Entering in on track five as usual, Lee Ranaldo’s “Walking Blues” had the flutter of guitars fill in for any backing vocals. The band plays so cooly, so detached, that not even the secret blooming dream work of “Antennae” (featuring another Sonic Youth effect: gale-force-wind guitars) or the ludicrousness of “Anti-Orgasm” (in which Kim and Thurston trade off on anarchist diatribes) seems forced. They all get their moments — Moore's oblique tribute to Germs singer Darby Crash "Thunderclap (for Bobby Pyn)," a Kim Gordon pop hook where she briefly channels every blonde in rock music, an incandescent Ranaldo solo that mirrors the flashing lights.
Yet the show’s standout — even more than Daydream Nation epic “The Sprawl” — was a feathery, mystical presentation of The Eternal’s closing track, “Massage the History.” Though Gordon introduced it as a Neil Young cover, the tugs of Moore’s acoustic guitar strings over her imploring request to “come with me to the other side” made her the backlit demon ghost of Courtney Love. “Pacific Coast Highway” off 1987 classic Sister, made her role in Sonic Youth ever more necessary. Offering a series of sleazy come-ons in her orgasm-choked growl (“come on baby, you make me feel so crazy”), Gordon’s not only a musician, but a guileless expression of womanhood entering the unknown.
Whatever point Sonic Youth are at in their careers, their live show encounters the ineffable. Those minor-tuned guitars (sawed by Ranaldo with a drumstick like a violin) strive to recapture that lost nostalgia of youth, the way you feel soaking up the last rays of summer on your parent’s porch before laying out your back to school outfit. A Kim Gordon dance solo radiates sex but also everything fevered, tragic and wild that comes with it. Whether the band is an art project, an expression of humanity, or a collision of pop, rock and all the feedback-drenched schizophrenia that coincides, tonight they embody the mystery felt in Ranaldo’s “What We Know.” This is what I know about Sonic Youth. This is what you know. Together we’ll meet in the middle, clasping our hands to our hearts as the inter-laid guitars disintegrate into drone.