We get older every year; Japan and Sonic Youth has some history between them going some way back, it seems, Lee Ranaldo reminiscing midway through the gig that they first played in Tokyo 20 years ago. An unseasonably festive atmosphere of rapt anticipation greeted these underground music veterans, and we weren’t short-changed – it didn’t quite have the feel of 1988-the-year-daydream-nation-broke transcendence, but for 67 minutes of revisionism genius it might as well have been. Experimental sound forms may be their lifeblood, but the sonic hardware from the recent The Eternal is more custom-made for enormous noise and blown speakers, the waves of mainlining guitar radiance they conjure up on new numbers like “Calming The Snake” and “Anti-Orgasm” are the stuff of forthright non-subjective joy. (Most rock dudes sound like real idiots saying shit like “Sonic Youth want all of you to have sex tonight”, as Thurston Moore did before kicking into the big dumb rock of “Anti-Orgasm”, but because it’s Sonic Youth and they did a Sister-era “Stereo Sanctity” that fucking blew your mind just ten minutes earlier and seriously left you believing you heard some otherworldly melodic noise you never heard before in your life, you let it slip as another one of those iffy propositions.) As with most things Sonic Youth, their performance spoke the language of despicably city-cool rock and roll, as epitomized by the hazy shades of electric blue on “Antenna” which the band seem to able to fearlessly stretch and bend at will.
(Setlist)
Sacred Trickster
No Way
Calming The Snake
Stereo Sanctity
Hey Joni
Anti-Orgasm
Poison Arrow
Antenna
Leaky Lifeboat
What We Know
Massage The History
Death Valley 69
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