Album: The Best Day
Year: 2014
. . .
While Thurston Moore started putting out solo albums in 1995, the only one that fully caught my attention in the same way my favorite Sonic Youth records was his fourth one, 2014’s The Best Day, which was kind of an upbeat “fuck you” to the people who were still pissed off that Sonic Youth broke up the way they did.
And because I’m a shallow person, I like The Best Day because Moore essentially put together a band for it that was not so far off from Sonic Youth: a second noise-rock guitarist named James Sedwards, a ringer bassist in My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Googe, and an even more ringer drummer in Sonic Youth’s Steven Shelley.
The resulting album was melodic noise-rock that sometimes had Thurston Moore singing on top of the songs and sometimes not. And honestly, any of of these songs could pretty much pass for late-period SY. Whether that’s a feature or a bug is up to you, but as someone who spent a month charting his personal journey through their music, you know where I stand.
That said, my favorite song doesn’t have any vocals, but is rather a nearly seven-minute jam called “Grace Lake,” which starts out with Moore’s and Sedwards guitars spinning curlicues around each other, and with Shelley pushing pushing pushing, head into fuzzed-out bombs bursting in air territory that is still a pleasure to hear, at least for me.
Is it groundbreaking like early Sonic Youth? Hardly. However, if you loved how that ground was broken, and want to walk some more of it, then you should check this out.
“Grace Lake”
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