A night of weird wonders awaited those who ventured to the Sinclair for a Sunday evening bill headlined by Thurston Moore’s Chelsea Light Moving. Moore is best known as a founding member of the legendary Sonic Youth, pharmacy unhealthy and he’s been a trailblazing figure in indie and alternative rock for upwards of three decades. Between bands, viagra solo records, find writing gigs and a record label, he’s a guy who seemingly never stops moving. Moore also looks impossibly youthful for his 54 years, and retains the goofy, slightly aloof sense of humor of his younger self. That the inaugural Boston show by his latest project brought everything from avant-noise to record store stand-up comedy to the table should come as no particular surprise.
The free-improv chaos of Prana-Bindu, a trio featuring Moore’s elder brother Gene, was up first. With a dual-guitar lineup backed by spastic percussion and the occasional woodwind squawk, Prana-Bindu didn’t perform songs so much as they fashioned a lengthy composition with peaks and valleys. String scraping and gentle plucking gave way to pitch-shifted roars and atonal shredding, which eventually collapsed into near silence again. It was a mesmerizing, furious set.
Australia’s Marco Fusinato was on next, inflicting a brief but caustic blast of ultra-distorted guitar and other abrasive tones on the crowd. Fusinato’s approach was somewhere between power electronics and the guitar-bashing of early Glenn Branca. He worked some black magic on a table of pedals and electronic devices in between confrontations with his instrument, generating unearthly howls made all the more disorienting by dramatically abrupt volume shifts. The set concluded earlier than planned when Fusinato inadvertently yanked several devices from the table and broke his signal chain, but by then he’d already made his impression.
The already out-there evening took its next oddball turn with a set of stand-up comedy by Cheapo Records employee and friend of the band Rob Thomas. Thomas regaled the crowd with tales of the bizarre customers native to the long-running Central Square record shop before bringing another Boston comedian on stage to riff on Record Store Day. They concluded by screening a reel of absurd, obscure music-related video clips. The crowd was getting restless by the time Chelsea Light Moving hit the stage. Moore had to toy with them just a bit more though, announcing his fictitious Record Store Day split with Black Sabbath before kicking off the set with “Burroughs.”
That track, and six others from the band’s self-titled debut LP, made up the bulk of the night’s setlist. Chelsea Light Moving’s noisy groove, anchored by Moore’s inventive guitar playing and beat-poet lyrics, is not all that far removed from his work in Sonic Youth, but pulls in a few new musical reference points that distinguish the project. The doom-y stomp of “Alighted,” rawer and meaner in live performance, probably wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a Black Sabbath split. “Lip,” with its snotty “too fuckin’ bad” chorus, combined with new song “No Go” to showcase some of Moore’s most directly punk-indebted songwriting in years.
Moore assembled Chelsea Light Moving from the touring band for his 2011 solo record Demolished Thoughts, and took to working on new material in the immediate wake of Sonic Youth’s indefinite hiatus announcement. The songs and the lineup are a testament to Moore’s curatorial skill. Samara Lubelski’s thundering bass lines, John Moloney’s pounding drums and Keith Wood’s solid work on second guitar, all exemplified beautifully during the set, render Chelsea Light Moving a rock-solid band.
Moore himself was in high spirits for the show, especially given that it was a late Sunday night at the end of a tour. He watched much of his brother’s Prana-Bindu set mingled with the crowd, joked around with his band on stage and even took a few minutes to school the crowd on poetry.
This new project isn’t quite an antidote to the resonating sting that is the possible breakup of one of the greatest rock bands of all time, but it’s certainly a worthy distraction while Sonic Youth sorts itself out. Sunday’s show brought lively performances of some pretty excellent songs to prove it.
