Refining the sound of last year’s sprawling Spirit Counsel into more focused riffs and songs, By the Fire suggests a renewed dialogue between Moore’s experimental instincts and his desire to rock.
In the nine years since Sonic Youth played their final show, the members’ solo projects have taken various elements of the band’s sound and run with them. Whether with her noise duo Body/Head or the stylized future-punk of last year’s No Home Record, Kim Gordon has eagerly played the experimental jet-setter, while Lee Ranaldo has embraced his standing as Sonic Youth’s resident beatnik on his wistfully melodic and psychedelic solo outings. But for those fans who just want the jams to run free forevermore, we have an impressive string of albums from Thurston Moore that essentially amount to Sonic Youth on steroids, reimagining the group as the sort of fearsome, festival-rockin’ workhorse that could theoretically lay waste to crowds at both Bonnaroo and Unsound with equal aplomb.
Moore’s new record, By the Fire, features the same core engine (guitarist James Sedwards and My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe) that powered his previous rock-oriented releases, 2014’s The Best Day and 2017’s Rock n Roll Consciousness. It also brings back two contributors (Negativland electronics expert Jon Leidecker and drummer Jem Doulton) that helped produce the mammoth, 63-minute “Alice Moki Jayne” movement from last year’s 3xLP collection of improvised instrumentals, Spirit Counsel. But where Moore typically files his avant-garde excursions outside his official discography, By the Fire mirrors the typography and spartan cover design of Spirit Counsel, suggesting a renewed dialogue between Moore’s experimental and accessible sides. The relationship between the two releases is analogous to that of Sonic Youth’s 1998 epic A Thousand Leaves and the concurrent series of free-form EPs they released on their SYR imprint, elements of which were refined into proper songs on the former. (In fact, By the Fire’s opener, “Hashish,” is essentially a more sinewy revamp of A Thousand Leaves’ “Sunday.”) While By the Fire doesn’t explicitly reference Spirit Counsel in the same way, it provides a more concise distillation of the same methodology—i.e., using apocalyptic noise to achieve an ecstatic peace, while reminding us that the punks and the hippies were always on the same side.
Of course, in this case, “concise” is a relative term—By the Fire still runs as long as most feature films, hovering just below the 90-minute mark. But it’s a record that justifies and even demands the extra space to explore; Moore and co. take their sweet time to sculpt squalls into riffs and lure extended meditations into melodic focus, like a roving crosshair that finally locks on its target. Moore’s first verse on “Siren” doesn’t surface until we’re three-quarters of the way into its 12-minute runtime, but the song’s gorgeous circular guitar pattern, which imagines Television transplanted from the East Village to the West Coast, makes it easy to sit back and savor the journey. “Locomotives” is even longer—and a much more forbidding prospect, with its extended death-cult procession of dissonance—but it too blossoms into something wondrous. “We are here, we come in peace,” Moore gushes as the song hits its strut, confirming that noise isn’t a mere aesthetic device on By the Fire but a narrative one too, representing the dark forces in the world that can be extinguished by the radiance of positive energy.
Like its song-focused predecessors, By the Fire once again features lyrical contributions credited to Radieux Radio, a mysterious London-based poet whose online presence just so happens to be limited to name-drops in Moore-related press. But whether Radieux Radio is an actual muse or elaborate ruse (or both), their partnership has invested Moore’s work with a more passionate perspective that gives his shape-shifting songs a clear ideological throughline. Where Moore spent his preceding records drifting between the personal and the spiritual, By the Fire is more firmly rooted in the political, though not in an obvious, “Yeah the president sucks/He’s a war-pig fuck,” kinda way. Rather, its songs suggest that peace is not passivity, and love is not sentimentality—they’re powerful yet perpetually under-siege forces that must be defended at all times, especially now.
Moore and his group bring heavy artillery to the battlefield. Though he has made plenty of psychedelic music, “Cantaloupe” is the closest he’s ever gotten to the sludge of pure stoner rock, as he rewrites the Book of Genesis into a call to arms for electric warriors everywhere: “On the second day/We drew streaks/Of lightning on your Tele.” Where Moore and Sedwards’ lacerating squall provides the frontline offensive on “Breath,” the rhythm section drives the armada forward with motorik propulsion, with Googe keeping her bass set to “You Made Me Realise” levels of griminess. Even when Moore strips back to just guitar and bass on “Calligraphy,” the album’s energy level doesn’t waver; his tense, tactile strums judder with Velvets-esque verve.
By the Fire is evenly divided between double-digit excursions and more compact rock songs, but its emotional climax, “They Believe in Love (When They Look at You)” hovers somewhere in the middle, rendering the eternal struggle between good and evil as a seven-minute cage match. As Moore writes in the liners, it’s “obviously a love song,” but one that announces itself with a menacing backbeat, needling guitar pricks, and nauseating ray-gun squeals. Dressing up its terms of endearment in ominous clamor, the song evokes the classic Sonic Youth chiller “I Love Her All the Time,” updating its “she’s on my side” refrain for more perilous times: “Where do we go after long goodbyes/Heart torn up when we’re not side by side.” Rather than surrender to doom, Moore keeps fighting for the light, transforming the track into a love song for love itself: “It's a profound wonder,” he sings, “a revolution, a truth!” At a time when the politics of hate sometimes feel like they are pushing the world to its breaking point, By the Fire posits that love constitutes its own act of radicalism.
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