Thurston Moore
The Best Day
MATADOR
7/10
You don’t need to hear this record for more than four seconds before you realize who is wielding that guitar like a piece of errant shrapnel. What’s different is that this isn’t an improv record or an acoustic ramble. Thurston Moore’s new band keeps Steve Shelley behind the drummer’s kit but adds guitarist James Sedwards and My Bloody Valentine’s bassist Debbie Googe. Together, they stir up a solid set of bruising noise and abyss-gazing drones. “Forevermore” slips Moore’s doomed beatnik poetry into a groove either straight from the Neu! playbook or it’s a rip from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Keep on Chooglin’.” Either way, it rules. As does the guitar intro on “Germs Burn.” There is a sense of nostalgia here, based on the album imagery (and the occasional references to Chelsea girls and mixtapes), but it’s the nostalgia of a man still deep in the throes of creation, heading deeper into the world he helped create.
