If Sonic Youth fans were hoping that the recent news that the band’s core duo of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon had settled their differences with the announcement of their collaborative album with Yoko Ono (handily called YOKOKIMTHURSTON), then you might want to look away now.
Since Moore and Gordon’s split late last year that saw the couple officially separating after 27 years of marriage, the future of the legendary band has been thrown into doubt. The good news is that fans of Sonic Youth’s lacerating noise-rock and visceral guitars my find some solace in the announcement of a new band featuring Thurston Moore.
SPIN has highlighted the announcement of Moore’s new band, Chelsea Light Moving. A quartet fronted by the guitar-slinger along with Keith Moore on six string, John Moloney on drums, and New York singer/songwriter Samara Lubelski on bass (we see you making those Kim Gordon comparisons already).
The band are currently signed to cutting edge label Matador, who have also offered up a first listen of the band in the form of single, “Burroughs.”
Named after, and inspired by, cult off-beat writer William S. Burroughs, who penned such iconic tomes as Naked Lunch and Soft Machine, Moore’s latest is a six-minute trip of buzzing, wiry riffs emblematic of early Sonic Youth material.
The press release even notes that Thurston Moore “came to the realisation that at some point he’d need to form a band that played Burroughs Rock” after “sitting in the orgone box planted in Burroughs’ backyard of Lawrence, Kansas in the midpoint of the 1990s”. The press sheet then goes on to describe it as “the sound of Wild Boys looking to jack hypos of core passion into their veins. Boy on boy. Girl on girl. Start there. It’s not even music – it’s an amphetamine sonnet for the on-the-loose lovers of the world.” Fair enough…
The newly formed quartet also have a handful of dates across America in June that are likely to be packed to the rafters. Chelsea Light Moving also promise “more tunes, more damage”, also teasing that “another song comes yr way in a week, even sicker.”
As they say, watch this space…
You can have a listen to the woolly rock of “Burroughs” below:
