Album of the Month: Thurston Moore - The Best Day

The Best Day is a sonic trip: Moore knows this road well and reserves the right to stop and admire the scenery. But this is by no means a self-indulgent record. Everything is necessary. From the looping and winding—often pleasingly chaotic—rhythms and bass-lines in Detonation, to the more delicate, carefree excursions in Vocabularies. This record has it all.

The opening track, Speak to the Wild (coming in at just under 9 minutes), starts like a dream; the trickling harmonics of Moore’s guitar gently stir from a four-year slumber. Cue the band: Debbie Googe of My Bloody Valentine, former Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, and Chrome Hoof guitarist James Sedwards. With those kind of credentials it’s a level playing field, there is no hierarchy: they are alt royalty.

Sonically bound, they construct music like it is syncopated architecture. Mechanical melodies and growling guitar work built atop solid bass lines and swelling drums. Scratchy, piercing notes, strange turns and pleasing chord progressions; this is simultaneously familiar and new. It’s upbeat and melodic yet tastefully dissonant. Neatly packaged end to end, The Best Day closes as it always should with Germs Burn: it does not stir, it shakes.

Perhaps his recent London residence has breathed new life into his approach but The Best Day is clearly marked by an assurance of Moore’s (and co.’s) patented craft.

Key Tracks: Speak to the Wild, The Best Day, Detonation, Grace Lake, Gems Burn

 

 

 

 

 

As the title and the artwork suggests, this is something exotic and dangerous. Like a tropical human sacrifice to garage rock gods gone by, Fruit Tones submit to a higher order of gnarled guitars, pummeling bass lines and frenetic drum beats that seem to surf atop a juicy wave of melody. But don’t take my word for it, Sly Vinyl are offering a ‘try before you buy’ full EP stream. The band recorded Some Strange Voodoo at Manchester’s Kraak Gallery onto reel-to-reel with Patrick Crane and it was mastered by local mastering wizard, Dominic Tanner.

Fruit Tones are: Tom Harrison (guitar/vocals), Dominic Oliver (bass/vocals) and Nova (drums). Some Strange Voodoo will be released on 7” yellow w/ black splatter vinyl via Stolen Body Records on the 10th November.

You can catch these three amigos make some of the most exciting racket you’re likely to hear at these following venues soon (with more to come I am promised):

Sounds like: The Chocolate Watch Band, Figures of Light, Black Lips

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