Sonic Youth core member Thurston Moore must have had a strange week. He opened for Pavement at the Hollywood Bowl, played one of their best sets in recent memory at Matador at 21 and then was publicly trashed by fellow indie-god Steve Albini for signing with Geffen 20 years ago. But you don’t create cutting-edge rock songs for nearly thirty years without the ability to focus, and Thurston Moore is emerging out of the chaos with, well, more cutting-edge art.
On his very-own label, Ecstatic Peace Library, Moore is releasing a new album and a new book. The catch is that they are the same release. Titled In A Silver Rain With A Paper Key, the release shows that Geffen didn’t destroy Moore’s creativity completely, with it consisting of“ “a hardcover monograph containing two seven-inch vinyl records, as well as art, photographs, lyrics, poetry and other texts from Moore’s personal notebooks and visual archives.”
Sure this may sound a little Billy Corgan-ish, but the 12-string tracks featured on the set, including “You’ve Lost Your Lover”, “Circulation”, and “Blood”, actually sound promising and though you can claim a lot of things about Sonic Youth’s career, they have rarely been masturbatory with their releases. Check out a sample over at TwentyFourBit, but beware of the DIY wrath that may be inflicted on you for supporting such a capitalist whore as Moore.