Sonic Youth HMV Kentish Town Forum, London 23/10/09
5/5
By: Matt Tomiak
It sure is a good time to be in a revered US alt-rock outfit these days, but amongst all the joyful reunions we shouldn’t forget about one band for whom it’s been (brilliantly belligerent) business as usual since not long after the birth of punk. The recent Pixies shows in the capital were propelled by a giddy sense of occasion, but tonight at the Forum No-Wave living legends Sonic Youth are as taught, tight and incisive as befits a band approaching thirty years in the game: opener ‘Sacred Trickster’ from this year’s The Eternal album is a suitably trim introduction.
And they still look incredible - there surely must be a storage space above some trendy NYC loft apartment containing hideously aged portraits of the band. Implausibly, bassist Kim Gordon is now 56. WINSTON CHURCHILL WAS PRIME MINISTER AT THE TIME OF HER BIRTH! Her husband, the ever-boyish guitarist Thurston Moore, ensures us they’re glad to be back in London and expresses gratitude to us Brits for ‘standing up to those BNF goons’ (his nomenclature slightly askew, but sentiments spot on) before the quintet tear into a deliciously combative ‘Anti-Orgasm’. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Nick Griffin.
Encoring with a coruscatingly epic ‘Cross the Breeze,’ an earnest paraphrasing of Stephen Colbert’s smirking enquiry of George W. Bush’s legacy comes to mind. “Sonic Youth…. great American band….or the greatest American band?” Well, it’s got to be one of the two, right?
Watch Sonic Youth headline the Primavera Sound festival and talk with Rockfeedback editor Tom Hannan below:
Artists in this article: Sonic Youth
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