Two years ago we wrote a snarky little blog post about Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon getting divorced. In it, we said we were actually pretty happy about it because it almost surely meant the end of Sonic Youth. Not to take anything away from SY, but all good things must come to an end eventually, whether it’s your favorite brunch spot or Ed Reed’s football career.
We all knew then that Thurston would do something, but what that something would be was anybody’s guess. Knowing him it could have been pretty much anything. As it turned out, it was Chelsea Light Moving.
Personally Chelsea Light Moving is almost exactly what we would have hoped for. Being over 50 and a veteran of No Wave it would have been incredibly easy for Moore to do something all weird and experimental or overly mellow and even acoustic, but with CLM he’s sort of gone back to his roots, inasmuch as his roots are Marshall Stacks. The self-titled record is good old fashioned guitar rock that calls to mind names like the MC5 and the Butthole Surfers, not to mention some of the early tracks by Sonic Youth.
In that blog post two years ago we called Thurston Moore the indie rock Paul McCartney, and the bottom line is that when someone that famous and influential comes around to play a $15 club show down the street it’s pretty tough to make any legitimate excuse not to go check it out.
Plus, Chain and the Gang. After seeing them play last year we decided they were also just about as good as can reasonably be expected. As far as old-dude double bills go they really don’t get much better than this.