Sonic Youth, J Mascis, Birchville Cat Motel at the St James

Reviewed by RUSSELL BAILLIE




The vast guitar and amplifier collection on display had you mentally calculating the excess baggage charges. There were still those moments when they played their instruments in ways that definitely weren't in the owner's manual.

And they still changed instruments between nearly every song as if the act had a subtext about rampant consumerism.

But if Sonic Youth did all the Sonic Youth things we've come to expect of them from their many past visits, the veteran New York art-rockers also seemed, well, a lot more fun.

Rather than the sometimes aloof art-rock assault, which made some of those past visits feel like a ritual to be endured, this time SY engaged, excited and entertained.

Heck, Thurston Moore even did slapstick, play-wrestling with a stage invader late in the set while attempting to make the incursion part of the performance (even if grappling with guy and guitar was never going to work).

First up was one-man Wellington noise band Birchville Cat Motel, who employed electric bagpipes, much knob twiddling and head-nodding (to a beat that maybe only dogs could hear) on a single drone-piece. What it lacked in form and volume, it more than made up for in, er, texture.

Imported support J Mascis played the loudest acoustic guitar in the world on a bunch of his old songs.

The former Dinosaur Jr mainman showed that he is still much in love with the quiet-quiet-LOUD dynamic he helped invent for the grunge era, switching from gentle chords to searing lead-lines and back again with much the same hilarious effect Animal had playing drums in the Muppets.

That wasn't his only trick with his effects boxes. Before lurching into the high-decibel stratosphere, he would play the rhythm guitar part and loop it as a backing track. It was occasionally brilliant, if oddly retrogressive.

Sonic Youth's set had started with the various members - including relative newcomer and fifth member Jim O'Rourke - taking turns to wander on to add to the introductory drone. Guitarist Lee Ranaldo came on pondering a book, threatening an outbreak of beat poetry.

But, leaning heavily on the melody-strong and concise tracks of new album Sonic Nurse, the set soon became compelling with its sense of momentum and with it came the feeling that this was far from a veteran band going through the motions.

It stopped being witty to say they weren't Youth-ful any more about the last time the band were here, some six years ago. They've outlived movements they were meant to be godparents to. They are to the 80s/90s alt-rock generation what the Grateful Dead were to theirs - standard bearers for a counter-culture that no longer holds centrestage. And by the smell of it, like the Dead, they're a stoner's band too.

But SY's performance became one long argument in favour of the adage of better-with-age. That's whether it was when Kim Gordon - now occasionally liberated from instrumental duties by O'Rourke and dancing like the punk-rock Stevie Nicks - deadpanned, caterwauled or hyperventilated her way through songs new or old. Or when her husband Moore sang his dreamy/whiney tunes, while the band's massed guitars chimed in jagged counterpoint above drummer Steve Shelley's elegantly propulsive playing.

They played three encores (including the wrestling match) and by the finish Sonic Youth had earned a renewed respect - for longevity, yes, but sheer vitality too.

Art-rock, like the stuff you hang on the walls, can soon fade as yesteryear's radical concept. On the evidence of this, Sonic Youth's art-rock continues to appreciate, just as fast as the band's body of work continues to expand.