Thurston Moore’s THE BEST DAY Brings Noise and Beauty, Sometimes Both at Once

Thurston Moore, of the now disbanded noise rock group Sonic Youth, brings beautiful chimey guitar work, droning distorted soundscapes, and even straight up rock ‘n roll to his new album The Best Day. After separating from his wife and fellow Sonic Youth bandmate Kim Gordon, Moore continues the legendary band’s sound with an album that recalls the group’s early ‘00s masterpiece Murray Street on several tracks, while offering a few surprises as well. Moore is joined by Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, as well as James Sedwards on guitar and Deb Googe of My Bloody Valentine on bass.

A cascade of guitar harmonics glisten like wind chimes album opener “Speak to the Wild,” a track of clean guitars that ebb and flow like the best material on Murray Street. “The king has come to join the band,” Moore sings amid imagery of the wilderness that envelopes civilization, with Moore grouping musicians in with wild animals rather than with the of empires of men. “Don’t let the dark get you lost,” he reminds us, describing a place where you can be free but have to navigate for yourself. The following track, “Forevermore,” is a sprawling plane of simmering dissonance, as guttural guitars pulsate while Moore expounds on the subject love in Dadaist poetic terms.

Next comes “Tape,” the first track on The Best Day to feature lyrics by poet Radiuex Radio, which Moore edited for the song. With abstract lyrics concerning mixtape culture, they are befitting for a man so steeped in the DIY world of music. Other tracks with lyrics by Radio include “Detonation,” which could read like a punk rock political manifesto covering the last 100 years, and “Vocabularies,” a meditation on gender roles. This is an especially charged topic for a man who just separated from the feminist icon and former Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon, and when Moore sings, “Boys, they had their say, that was all yesterday,” he is evoking a more progressive tomorrow, perhaps for himself as much as everyone else.

The title track, “The Best Day,” is an unexpected treat from Thurston Moore, a rollicking rock ‘n roll number that wouldn’t have been out of place on an early ‘70s Rolling Stones record. An affirming shot in the arm on an album that is largely contemplative, Moore brings the swagger in his impassioned vocal performance, singing lines like “Here’s a man who walks alone/He takes and bow then he takes you home,” a celebration of rock ‘n roll strut. After the deft rock-your-face-off guitar solo the song goes widescreen on the chill-out coda, a much-merited rest after one of the best garage rock songs of the year.

The final two tracks, “Grace Lake” and “Germs Burn,” revisit the Murray Street territory with which Moore opens the album, with a familiar but welcoming sonic palette. The Best Day may largely evoke Moore’s days with Sonic Youth, but it also definitely shows an artist who still knows how to pull off surprises all on his own.