Thurston Moore @ Echoplex, 10/30/07

I met up with J. Giovanni and B. and B. Hart tonight for the soothing sounds of Thurston Moore's new "Trees Outside the Academy" tour. I have already heard many die hard Sonic Youth fan's, such as (Raymond of locals E>K>U>K and Maxwell Demon) say that Trees Outside the Academy was everything that Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped should have been. Relying heavily on acoustic guitars and stringed arrangements, this warm and lush album transfers excellently to the stage live.

I worked my way to the front of the hardly packed Echoplex and waited through one of the shittiest 27 minutes of my young adult life. Scores (featuring Heather Leigh Murray and Christina Carter who sings on a couple tracks on Trees Outside the Academy) opened for Thurston, and regrettably so. This female duo on electric slide guitar and lap steel started the night with a whole bunch of high pitched howlin'. This is obviously music from the soul, but maybe it's left better kept in the soul rather than in the ears of the audience, who seemed squeamish the entire time. Scores sounded like a gang of ghosts raping a pregnant lesbian wolf bitch while riding the Matterhorn at Disneyland and listening to Cocteau Twins. And don't get me wrong, I love Cocteau Twins. This duo was a bunch of bullshit in my honest opinion (which you're going to get whether you like it or not; you're reading this.) Seriously, it was just two older chicks howling for at least half an hour and playing some slow and droney guitars. The music DID NOT CHANGE the entire time. So fucking repetitive I wanted to walk on stage on start peeing on their faces so they would fucking leave already. If there was talent on stage, I didn't see it, and neither did the handful of people from the audience who walked away during their set.

Finally the cacophonous cries for mother's milk ended and the man, the legend, Mr. Thurston Moore came on stage! He came out calm and cool, and mentioned something of having a Halloween mask. He asked if we wanted to see it. Of course we did! The audience cheered and screamed. He went backstage, and came back with the corniest skull mask I have ever seen. Then he jumped into the audience and got on his back and began having what appeared to be a violent fake seizure of some sort. He growled and he hissed for a minute, then got back on stage. I don't know for sure, but I think I was the only one who was amused by this. I didn't know he'd be so playful and geekily down to earth. The audience was pretty silent.

He ripped through a tight acoustic set composed entirely of songs from his new album, and then came back with an encore that consisted of a couple songs from Psychic Hearts, the highlights being Queen Bee and Her Pals and the title track which were the only songs he switched to a Jazzmaster for. And Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley (surprise!) beat the hell out of the drums the whole time. Rock on!