Thurston Moore
By The Fire

THE REVIEW

If I knew how to play the guitar, and maybe intended to release a guitar-based album, I'd always feel a bit uncomfortable knowing there's still someone like Thurston Moore releasing records.

Yes, because we are talking about one of the last innovators of the six-string, someone who in 35 years of activity has turned the concept of "what" one can do with a guitar inside out, creating musicality and melody from white noise, crafting a unique and recognizable sound like few others, especially at a time when the instrument in question seemed to have already said everything it could.

I have honestly heard very little of his solo work because the beautiful Sonic Youth records have always been enough for me, but in a shitty moment like the one we're all going through, I feel an insuppressible need for "that" sound, for "that" guitar. And if, like me, you have this insatiable desire, the 70 minutes of "By The Fire" should suffice. And then some.

Don't be fooled by the first two, albeit beautiful, tracks that wink at his production with Sonic Youth (not to say we're on the verge of self-plagiarism, especially on the riff of "Cantaloupe" which harkens back to the classic "Sugar Kane" from '92): the rest of the album is anything but Moore playing to himself. Many of the tracks are long, if not very long, moving between the percussive and the psychedelic, in some cases divided into mini suites (the wavering "Breath" which alternates Moore's typical open arpeggios with a perfect rock refrain). On the psychedelic and hypnotic side, there's "Siren" 12 minutes of distilled cascading guitars lost in an endless crescendo broken at the 9-minute mark by the sudden entrance of singing. The dreamy moments of "Dreamers Work" are beautiful, as are the more formally "rock" ones (never as with Moore, using this term to describe his music sounds terribly inappropriate) as in "Calligraphy".

So hats off to our sixty-year-old who, besides what's described above, adds two pièce de résistance of 30 minutes total: the first, "Venus", is an exercise in guitars endlessly ascending toward nowhere; the second, "Locomotives", is a long rumination between arpeggios from the Sonic Youth era "Washing Machine", percussive krautrock, and a finale with an unusual perfect psych rock solo.

Make way for the old!