Album Review: Spirit Counsel by Thurston Moore

For 40 years now, Thurston Moore has maintained dual citizenship in the worlds of rock and the avant-garde. But where he spent his three decades in Sonic Youth straddling the line between those discrete realms, he's spent much of his solo career jumping from one side to the other. For every tuneful acoustic collection he's issued under his own name and every searing set of guitar jams he's kicked out with his Thurston Moore Group, there are literally over a hundred small-run micro-label releases and one-off collaborations where Moore has indulged his unabating loves of improvised noise, free jazz, spoken-word poetry, and black metal without interfering with his official indie-rock discography.

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In many ways, Thurston Moore's songs for Sonic Youth were defined by the struggle between his experimental impulses and more traditional rock structures. On his more daring work, the sprawl would eclipse recognizable song form altogether, landing in a cloudy, guitar-based reading of free jazz. With endless side projects and collaborative recordings, Moore embraced his love of noise and free music to an even wider degree.

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This year's Battery Park, NYC: July 4, 2008 offered a bittersweet look back for Sonic Youth fans. Thurston Moore shows little interest in nostalgia on his new release, the three-disc Spirit Counsel set. Instead he explores his predecessors and his own past work as ways to push forward, creating a series of lengthy extended compositions that unexpectedly warrant their run times as they look into avant-garde guitar tones and formal structures.

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