Review Summary: Just think about it
As you get older, you begin to get slightly more reflective. As your body becomes slower, so do your thoughts and words. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, at 52, is no spring chicken, but
Demolished Thoughts is bound by a nervous energy that suggests Thurston isn’t ready for the retirement home just yet.
Produced by Beck, the LP is replete with layers of sweet guitars and at times haunting string accompaniment that calls to mind the work of Nick Drake. Following on from 2007’s
Trees Outside The Academy, which combined these elements with a more typical Sonic Youth-style sound,
Demolished Thoughts feels unforced and more like a completely natural progression and at a lean nine songs, represents an album that has enforced a necessary policy of quality control on an artist known for self-indulgence.
This notion is given credence by the tip-top standard of songs like “Illuminine”, “Circulation” and “Blood Never Lies”, delivering acute guitar playing underneath the tense and almost whispered vocal delivery. “Orchard Street” sees itself play out into a hurricane of strings, ever-faster strumming and a host of other orchestral aids and providing the listener, if connected with the album, a maelstrom of kaleidoscopic mental images. The evocatively titled “In Silver Rain With A Paper Key” confides in the listener with tales of ghosts on empty streets and “Mina Loy” is a paean to one of Moore’s major artistic influences. Loy’s influence must be widespread, his name being used once before for a track on Billy Corgan’s trite solo effort,
TheFutureEmbrace.
Demolished Thoughts presents these tracks as fragile compositions, always on the verge of some form of collapse, but this is kept at bay by the experience and astute musicianship of Moore. If anything, this LP highlights just what an excellent guitarist and lyricist Moore is; attributes that can sometimes become lost in the fevered noise of his first job.
