Gig review: Thurston Moore, The Arches

EVEN at the age of 53, sometime Sonic Youth singer and guitarist Thurston Moore is a paragon of slacker youth.

Earlier in the day – the six foot-plus singer told us – he had missed his 10am flight from Dublin and almost missed the afternoon’s rescheduled flight when he fell asleep in a coffee shop.

A search for onstage “libations” led him to commandeer his harpist’s glass of red wine and muse upon his belief that a band’s culinary choices affect their compositional abilities: “I have a steady diet of dirt.”

Less amusingly, this solo tour comes in the wake of news that Moore has split from his wife and Sonic Youth bandmate Kim Gordon, leaving the future of the group uncertain.

As such, this wasn’t just an excuse for Moore to revisit tracks from his three-album, 15-year solo side career – it was a taste of how that career might become his main point of focus in future.

Despite the sit-down nature of the show and the fact many of the songs were semi-acoustic (his band featured a violinist as well as the harpist), the familiar, fractured alternative rock tropes of Sonic Youth still shone through.

There was Mina Loy from this year’s Beck-produced Demolished Thoughts album, a song with the hypnotic tone of an Indian raga, and the carnivalesque weirdness of Queen Bee and Her Pals. January and Blood Never Lies maintained a pastoral, reflective air, while Fri/End was sweet-hearted guitar pop and Patti Smith Math Scratch bore an unlikely echo of T-Rex. The menacing grind of Pretty Bad closed the encore of a set which was subdued by Moore’s standards, but also indicative of an enduring creative spirit.

Rating: ***