Sonic Youth & Hush Arbors, Live @ London Forum

After a bout of gross enthusiasm with Hush Arbors, who appeared in a five piece band incarnation, I shuffled my way through the biggest dose of industry malaise I have yet had. Here I was at a long sold out Sonic Youth show at The Forum in Kentish Town, on the guest list with entry to the after party, watching a much revered band who I already knew I wasn’t that moved by. I bought their ‘Dirty’ LP when I was sixteen, and have periodically revisited it in the hope, or least open to the possibility, that it would one day click. It hasn’t yet. People say “try Goo”, the guy I met in the smoking pen said I should “listen” to ‘Daydream Nation’ before telling me that he was considering “knifing” me for the after party pass. Jokingly, I’m pretty sure; like me I imagine that he knew what it would amount to.

Hush Arbors have just had a second record released by the Thurston Moore affiliated label Ecstatic Peace!, which I reviewed here. It’s had mixed reviews, some hark back to songwriter Keith Wood’s “experimental credentials” as a member of Sunburned and Six Organs of Admittance when speaking of the consistent emergence of conventional folk rock arrangements on his records, others just dig it or bury it. Either way it plunges your hands in the soil.

As the band started out, with a couple of numbers from the new record including ‘Lisbon’, I wasn’t sure where we were headed. Wood’s high-pitched voice merged with the prominent, centre stage vocals of Lizzie Oswell, clad in her webbed leotard and self-assured swirling. The blending of their harmonies was initially a little off-putting, it was hard to discern the personality in each voice.

The band seemed shaky, not that there isn’t a wide-eyed jitter at the heart of their sound, but from the first chords of third song ‘Fast Asleep’ they settled and expanded. Oswell’s harmonies on ‘Coming Home’ radically alter the chorus and the feel of the whole song to boot. It’s a bold move that comes off well, dragging the melody away from its resolution. The strange way that she slips upwards and away may have contributed to the band grabbing more and more of the listless, Youth-awaiting crowd’s attention.

They capitalised on it with the skitter of ‘Follow Closely’ from last year’s astounding self-titled record; Leon Dufficy may have shunned the spotlights but he nailed a re-reading of Ben Chasny’s guest solo on the recorded version. Due to his caterwauling away in a dark corner of the stage I made sure to get a proper shot of this Aussie snake-charmer, complete with one of Keith Wood’s hands giving his finest Virginian salute, see photo #9. Prints now on sale via Ebay, £20 reserve, ok kids?

The hot-forged hooks of ‘Gone’ sunk a few more barbs, crowd babble took a steady dive as the band worked their weird, leprechaun-baiting charm, reeling the audience in slowly but surely with an extended version of ‘Devil Made You High’. It began much like the sweet demo version that cropped up on their Myspace a few months back, then slowly but surely made its way through three gears to some irrefutable force, stopping each time to ooze beauty over the chorus. Here Oswell and Wood’s vocals really hit the heart.

So there was a break, during which my good companion and I found out that we had access to the seats up in the balcony and made what might have been our first error. As you can see from the photos, I wasn’t exactly looking up at the canopy of Thurston’s mop from the toe of his teenage shoes. And the sound at the Forum was pretty shit. You can swallow a four pound can of Guinness and a two pound cloakroom charge far easier when the venue have devoted at least a shred of their Massive Profit Margin to the equipment. But no, the Guinness went down as bitter as the messy high end that tore at my ear tubes.

And the strobe lights… there’s something in that pseudo-Burroughsian, sub-Gysinian rhythm that I truly hate. Whilst a Dreamachine might transpose subconscious imagery onto thy waking world’s eyelid, these strobe lights magnified my dislike of the music. Without them, and in an iron cage (with room for shimmying) four feet from the stage, I might have had a passable time. But I’m stalling here and you all know it. Even my projected “I felt so bad that I was taking up a seat while some poor bastard moped his ticketless way back to whence he came” paragraph won’t cut the mustard.

Sonic Youth are so annoying. To me…and my best mate… we cool? And I’ll tell you why (not speaking for my mate, who would have many a harsher word I believe): It’s not the discordance or the density of their sound alone, and it’s not the tra-la-la punky bubblesomeness, it’s the combination of all three. Being my first experience of Ranaldo, Gordon et al on stage, I can’t relate with the dude at the urinal who thinks they’ve completely lost it, citing an evening in 1988 as corroborative evidence.

This was during the second encore which I would not have sat through for any money (though I stayed at the venue for rumours of a free bar = lies), instead I was most sensible, taking advantage of the lack of a queue at the cloakroom and urinal, hence the repeated observation. Personally I quite like their latest album, The Eternal, and as such enjoyed those songs the most. ‘Anti-Orgasm’s one of ‘em, the rest I don’t know, but I recognised their red brown bubbling interspersed throughout. Fucking Strobe Lights!

I also quite liked the long song which saw Thurston take to an acoustic guitar and a stool (for sitting on) while the rest made good use of the vacant space, and the ones with Ranaldo at the microphone. One of his had a Cobain-like chord sequence. It was pretty alright. At one point the centre of the whooping throng below began swaying pendulum like to a degree that sent all kinds of alarm bells ringing in the security camp, one of them raised his head with a quizzical authoritative look, and the crowd softened the sway…

Live Pics: