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Thurston Moore, "Sensitive/Lethal"
Even after the passage of 27 years of recording and releasing music, Thurston continues to map new sonic geographies. Here, his particular focus is on all-out cathartic, expansive but nevertheless gritty, crater-strewn guitar-drone and feedback terrain, ranging across vast fields and landscapes to create his works of cyclopean noise.
Moore presents us with three sedimentary layers of granitic noise, consisting of the short four minute "Whisper" sandwiched and compressed between two lengthy 20+ minute epics that lend their names to the title of the album, "Sensitive" and "Lethal." "Sensitive" flies in with a meditative drone-field combined with a strummed acoustic six-string just perceptible in the mix, and punctuated violently with machine-gun staccato bursts and overlaid with frenzied guitar-spawned feedback screeches and chirps; a series of tectonic upheavals gouging out deep fractures and chasmic trenches, chunks of rock, earth and gargantuan boulders being flung haphazardly this way and that. The closing 26 minute piece, "Lethal," bombards with equally dramatic and relentless blasts of sonic destruction, grainy loops and stabs of klaxon guitar sludge, high-pitched howling seismic feedback, and spectacularly eruptive granularity, and veined with a persistent locust buzz, the whole descriptive of the tortured anguish of a ruptured planet with its cracking, splitting, breaking, and wrenching. In between these two, Moore spreads a thinner, more savory layer of looped guitar feedback and harmonic drone in the form of the aforementioned "Whisper," an interlude of comparative and relative quiescence, certainly less frenzied and less cataclysmic than the two pieces which bracket it, but just as noisy; a breathing space between the fire and brimstone detonating from the earth and crashing down from above.
The wonder (and relief) of this is, that even after nigh on three decades of performing and creating, where others seem to mellow out and settle back into insipid self-indulgent dotage, Moore still retains the capacity to be incendiary. Some would of course argue that this is just another species of self-indulgence and in some ways this assertion carries with it a grain of truth; however, Moore isn't going to be held hostage either to convention or popular taste, or to the vagaries of musical fashion—he'll follow his own path. The pieces contained herein are, therefore, almost a confessional, an apocalyptic catharsis, an outpouring of the deepest-seated traumas buried within the psyche, the inner personal upheavals reflected in the outer seismic fracturing Moore convincingly portrays. People tend to forget that the ruptures of the fabric of the mind are as devastating in effect as those ruptures in the earth's crust, causing as much disruption, anguish, and suffering for the one as for the many – as above so below, the macro being mirrored in the micro.
Moore is an exquisite and literate craftsman, sculpting and molding random granular chaos into a crunching, crushing monolithic order, the end result exhibiting a mass and weight big enough to generate its own gravitational field. But like some kind of deity perched somewhere up above the confines of the big blue planet below, Moore directs and wills his material to do his bidding and into the shapes he desires. Truly monumental stuff.
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