As artists like the Replacements and U2 spent the 1980s paving the roads leading to the many futures of rock music, a band of rebels from New York’s alternative scene tore up the same roads, carving their sonic landscapes deep into the American music consciousness. After carving his teeth in experimental guitar orchestras and hardcore bands, it's with these rebels that Thurston Moore first made his name. In Sonic Youth, Moore helped tear apart rock music convention, crafting soundscapes of distorted noise rock and fury driven punk.
With The Best Day, Thurston Moore returns to those scraped up roads, looking over them with prideful contentment. His second solo album since Sonic Youth went on hiatus in 2011 (and fourth overall), The Best Day revisits the same indie rock sketched from the noisy lead that Sonic Youth engineered. He roughly ekes out the breakdowns and stretches along his tattered highways, drawing from them to create what, quite frankly, feels like a dry recreation.
Moore introduces The Best Day with a pair of noise epics recalling the long and winding playtime of Sonic Youth's “Karen Revisited." He and his supergroup co-stars (including My Bloody Valentine alum Deb Googe and Sonic Youth bandmate Steve Shelley) fill about twenty minutes with show openers “Speak to the Wild” and “Forevermore,” showing that Moore fully desires to revisit the more expansive moments of his Sonic Youth backdrop. Likewise, he brings on those moments of instrumental guitar worship (“Grace Lake”) and even weaves in tradition (check out the title-track blues).
While “Grace Lake” approaches the feedback-drenched melodies of its forefathers, and “Forevermore” expands into an 11-minute dreamscape, they lack kinetic drive; they thunder along a set beat but never really expand out of that rhythm to breathe. There's no dynamism to shake the noisy landscape, no rests nor sprints taken. The supergroup backing Moore carries their instruments with professional skill, but they sound hesitant throughout; only on “Germs Burn” does the quartet explode into post-punk insanity.
The Best Day is the maturing of Moore's experimental brand of indie rock: one where he looks back on its past with an eased grin and fond remembrances and an eased look towards the future. But in that fleeting past, Moore seems to have left behind the righteous drive that powered his past work. Where there was once a highway ferociously torn, only lightly sketched recreations remain.
Rating: C
