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SONIC YOUTH - Daydream Nation - Live at Glasgow ABC - 22nd August


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http://living.scotsman.com/music.cfm?id=1334312007

Seminal bands relive their youth with classic playlists

DAVID POLLOCK

SLINT ****

ABC, GLASGOW

SONIC YOUTH *****

ABC, GLASGOW

PRESENTED by the left-field alternative festival All Tomorrow's Parties as part of its mouthwatering series of gigs performed under the Don't Look Back banner, these two very welcome shows marked the first time the series has travelled north of the Border, thanks to Glasgow promoters Synergy.

The premise of Don't Look Back is very simple: a classic band with a bit of history get together on stage and perform their finest hour in its entirety, playing their most revered album in order from start to finish. Although both Louisville post-rock founding fathers Slint and New York No Wavers turned alternative rockers Sonic Youth hold a special place in the hearts of underground music fans the world over, the real draw - and the ceaselessly creative longevity of the more famous band's career - was apparent here. Slint managed one well-attended gig, while Sonic Youth were playing the first of two sold-out shows.

It's doubly impressive, then, that Slint played what might be considered the lesser of these two gigs. Presenting their 1991 album Spiderland (the second of only two albums they made in their career), they were excellent. On pain of sounding paternal, many contemporary purveyors of what might be glibly defined as "alternative" music could do a whole lot worse than listen to them for a true definition of the term, for Slint make defiant, risk-taking, noisy music that still sounds boundary-pushing today.

The originators of the quiet-loud-quiet template of instrumental guitar music which has since been foisted on us by everyone from Mogwai to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, their music is sonorous, bleak and strangely introspective. The sound was exceptional for this show - if a little deafening in certain parts of the hall - as it really needed to be, and what little vocals there were ended up drowned out by the utterly epic, occasionally simply primal, music.

After the six lengthy tracks from Spiderland had been played, they treated the crowd to both songs from 1994's Slint EP, their final recording to date, and a long-awaited new track entitled King's Approach. Instilling a kind of fury to Krautrock's metronomic approach, it's not just a great song but an indicator of new directions to come. There was no encore, as if one were needed.

Yet however much Slint impressed, Sonic Youth felt like the main event, although their style seemed almost like pop music next to the previous night's occupants of this stage. Nonetheless, Sonic Youth are a group who weather well with age, and that's not just a reference to the youthful complexions of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, the husband and wife team at the heart of the band.

Perhaps even more so than Spiderland - certainly in terms of how widely it's recognised and how many DIY rock bands it's influenced - Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation is a seminal album, and the automatic first choice for an event like this. From the boundless power pop of the opening Teenage Riot to the grinding, dissonant closing suite of The Wonder, Hyperstation and Eliminator J, the band's performance of it was faithful, yet filled with a fiery energy that you wouldn't associate with most bands giving a repertory performance in their third decade.

Even more generous than Slint with the extra tracks at the end, Moore, Gordon, et al actually came back with two encores, which seemed like a handy way of compartmentalising the output of different eras as much as anything else. First they gave us five songs from last year's Rather Ripped album (their 14th full studio recording) including tracks that compare favourably with those classics which had gone before, such as Incinerate and Do You Believe In Rapture? Impressively, both sets of songs seemed to energise the band equally, with Gordon dancing feverishly along to Jams Run Free as she might have done during one of Daydream Nation's earliest performances.

Finally, after a note of thanks to their "Scottish brothers and sisters" (Glasgow's musical underground has always been in tune with the kind of willfully individual noise Sonic Youth make), they returned for one last song, this time the tumultuous Shaking Hell, from their first album proper Confusion Is Sex. It might be appropriate to say that both bands had provided us with a rather concise history lesson, if it wasn't about so much more than that.

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Yeah, Kim said they were heading to sleazy's later in the evening at the gig.

I thought it was ana amzing gig. I think I prefer the time I saw them at the barrows but that's purely on atmosphere. Being stuck behind the two largest (by sheers mass - both height and width) morons in the place didn't help. Oh, and we did move around them constantly... they just seemed to manage to get directly on front of us again every time.

Cracking gig though.

Full marks to you for telling that man to fuck off though...

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