The twenty-something year old back catalog of Sonic Youth records can be daunting and polarizing. The shady, NYC-dwelling paramours of punk invention create a lot of records in a relatively short period of time, and they do so stubbornly and absolutely without an eye for passive listener consumption. Apt adjectives of anything SY could easily be “challenging” or “obscure” but what is often lost in the mix is the sheer will to be “rewarding” on their own terms.
Extrapolating that out to its smaller component parts, Thurston Moore has been at the center of that “make storm” from the beginning. While his tall, lanky, every-day-dad-in-the-hardware-store look is as iconic as Prince’s eerily shaved body to the denizens of rock’s thriving underground, he is among the most inventive pioneers to strap on a fender. On Trees Outside the Academy, Moore summons a dark, multi-layered sound hinging largely on his acoustic guitar. Moore backs himself up with an array of artists, Samara Lubelski on violin (brilliantly on the albums first track, “Frozen Guitar”) and J. Mascis’ (an outcropping of the Rather Ripped session) scattergun electric guitar, just to name a few. The album stretches out, from the hearty folk stylings (“Honest James”) to the wholly melodic (“Fri/End”) to (“Wonderful Witches + Language Meanies”) something that feels like a refugee track from his main project.
Moore has invented an album that feels like twelve variations on a theme, a project based on friendly collaboration. It’s hard to arrogantly place intent on Thurston Moore, someone who has been so genuinely driven, an up and down contributor to the punk movement since most of his fans were in diapers. Clearly though, this album has heart, characteristically disjointed, strange and unfettered, but its more evidence that light shines in the dark, explosive world that is Sonic Youth. Sometimes its paladins come give us a tour of that world on their own.
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