Sonic Youth – Roxy, Boston, MA – 8/13/02
On a sweltering Tuesday night, NYC’s Sonics favored the hub with their unblemished credibility and unwavering relevance. With a postmodern, indy cinema backdrop of flickering black and white images captured by cameras aimed at the audience crowding the front of the stage, the set was heavy on material off their latest disc Murray Street which isn’t as riffy as their early nineties stuff or as challenging as their eighties stuff. The new songs, like the ones on 1998’s A Thousand Leaves show a respect for structure and melody with enough dissonance and anarchy to keep you off balance. Thurston’s bizarre comments may have been enough to destabilize most of the sold out house though. His congratulating Nick Cave and Lisa Marie Presley on their recent marriage shortly after playing guitar behind his head was as peculiar as their playing of Drunken Butterfly was satisfying.
-Eric Holland