Sonic Youth / J Mascis
as experienced by G at Metrocity, Freemantle, Australia. Photos by Louis Bravos. Photos by Chris Irvine.
Have you ever gone to back to an old house you haven't vistied since childhood? Have you ever been disappointed with what you found? What you touch and see has in no way physically changed. Everything seems smaller; that's logical enough. Corridors seem less maze-like. Prohibited out of reach shelves lie at chest height. Sanctified parental areas no longer hold their authority. Even if you can't put your finger on it, something has certainly changed. Maybe it's the paint on the wall that has faded and bleached over the years, or maybe it's your memory. And then it dawns on you, nothing here has changed. The only thing that has changed is you.
The appearance of J Mascis moderately shaking. If it hadn't been for the cheers around me I would've mistaken him for a senior roadie: baggy tye dye sweater, a long weathered flange of silver hair, round tinted glasses, alone on stage slumped on his silver throne. To complete the time machine effect J strums into his 80s and early 90s Dinosaur Jr back catalogue. He's so much more clearer than I've been expecting. It's an isolated and personal voice with a sad tendency to croak, somehow without losing coherence. Dang - born into another era this guy could've been a great country singer. And it's just as we're lulling into the instrumental that we discover J's guitar is not accoustic; it's semi-acoustic with a fatherfuckeing bitch of an amp, with which he splits our skulls in a fever. Abruptly, killing it to return to his submissive strum and lost little-guy voice. Perhaps it a misunderstanding with the mixing engineer but when he flicks the electric switch on his second song the distortion is muted. The respite lasts only a few seconds. With a flick his foot J floods his amp into overdrive. It's the Mascis guirar philosophy in its purest form. The only way to make that lengendary sound is to bulldoze every valve as high as it will go. Lunging, twisted; even in a sitting position he looks like he's wrestling with an aligator. It makes me think of all the great guitarists I've ever yet to see, or shall ever see. I think of live TV footage of Dick Dale; tight, erect, every muscle in his body locked and straining; his head red and bulging about to fly off like a champagne cork. As the set develops the solos become longer, and it feels like we're going further in. For the life of me I wish I knew the title of his penultimate number, as his fingers draw out a long, burning lament - a resound with all the range and monstrosity of Neil Young's 'Cortez the Killer'.
He finishes with an idiosyncratic 'Just Like Heaven'. The reception is warm and sincere. Although I have to ask Chris what he thought. "I still think he's an areshole. He's always been talented. I just hate him as a person. He's self indulgent." It's been said of J that he's never fulfilled his potential. As he waves to the audience there is still the feeling that despite the indivdual gestures of passion, there is still something untapped, an inner coal we have rarely sparked upon.
For whilst before the gig I wondered whether ten or more years ago would have been the ideal time to see Mascis, Sonic Youth too fell under that crosslight. It doesn't take a genius to hear how they've mellowed for more than a decade now. Can they still mine the unrestrained mania that once made them a force unlike any other? Will they be a faded, bleached memory of their former selves?
It's a quintessential Sonic Youth introduction. Each member appears one at a time, setting on an instrument, not neccessarily playing it in any conventional sense, but bleeding something from it, so that when Kim Gordon arrives to complete the quintet (Sonic Youth live now features the talents of well travelled New York guitarist/producer Jim O'Rourke) the five disctintcly seperate whirling dervishes click into one united flow. It's no small effort of orchestration. There's an entire regiment of pedals in front of them. I'm surrounded by some seriously freaked Americans. One incognizant woman screams her devotion until her oxygen is consumed. One dancer seems so gone he appears not to know where the band is, bounding for a large part with his back to the stage.
But for the majority the band play melodically and within their limits. As Chris passed down to me from a recent interview their more settled direction has arrised from them finally mastering their instruments. They don't have to scrape their guitar strings with drumsticks because they can actually play them. To this end Thurston Moore has declared them the most practiced they've ever been. Not that that stops them scraping and battering their devices when their blood rises, and the caveman rhythm runs across the stage. Even the laterally, recognisably maturer material has an audible weight behind it. They are hypnotic. Thurston convulses over his axe with each sonic purge. Kim reigns aloof, terrifying as Stephen King's blood drenched Carrie, her leathery body swathed in pink silk, knotted arms grapling her bass like some death club - half lizzard queen, half death in a dress.
They play '100%', then two encores, closing with with some derranged electric cylone which transmorgrifes into 'Kool Thing'. This is implausible. Sonic Youth do not play greatest hits type sets. They do not do crowd pleasers. They repuredly hate song title call outs. They've just played their two best known songs. They're loving it, pushing every button to fire some agonizing, guts out turbulence. Thurston inadvertently breaks his guitar strap, even as he does, wrapping his tool into his body, molding the whole movement into act of continued play. As the fatal drone of the final chorus over-arcs it's a wonder there's a fuse still left functioning anywhere in the building. SonicYouth: just a faded, bleached memory? Fuck no. They can still push the button of raging excess. See them now at the peak of their evolution.
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