Nashville Music Blog

Last night, The Spin descended upon City Hall to find a long line snaking around the building, and the crowd was a mixed bag of regular people and old people. Some of the regular, non-old people looked too young to have heard anything before Sonic Youth's most recent record, 2006's Rather Ripped. But that wasn't a handicap, as the band's set focused largely on that record. But first, they'd have to wait through opener Leslie Keffer's squall of feedback, static and noise, and the crowd seemed sharply divided.

When Keffer took the stage with a female accomplice at 9:20 p.m. and kick-started a looped sample of a dance beat with pre-recorded ethereal female vox, the crowd cheered. For six minutes, the beat held steady while Keffer & Co. danced and coaxed a mounting sea of feedback from their table o' gear. The second song was a dissonant cricket orchestra of chirps, static-y ebbs and undulations.

Noise aficionados were surely delighted, but the rest of us were growing impatient for even a hint of a melody. Or, you know, structure of some kind. "Horrible!" shouted one showgoer lingering by the bathroom, "Seriously, I'm just annoyed at this point. I'm old, but I'm not THAT old! I didn't pay to see this!"

He wasn't alone. Random boos and shouts of "Please stop!" permeated the applause and cheers after every song. Keffer's experimental noise sculptures weren't inherently bad--they just belonged in a more intimate environment, with people who didn't come to hear "Dirty Boots."

We never would hear most of those treasured chestnuts, incidentally. After Keffer's 20 minute set ended in an R. Kelly dance-off with crowd participation, Sonic Youth eventually took the stage (with former Pavement bassist Mark Ibold) to open with "Incinerate," one of Rather Ripped's more toe-tappable numbers, and continued with a set that featured easily half of that album, with few dips into their extensive back catalog.

"Reena," Rather Ripped's opening track, followed, and then came "The World Looks Red," off Confusion is Sex.

Lee Ranaldo took the mic for Goo's "Mote," and later, to our delight, Daydream Nation's "Hey Joni."

The band looked and played as energetically as any of your cherubic up-and-coming indie rockers, so save your "Sonic Old" jokes for at least another decade. Kim Gordon danced like a fan even as she sang, and Thurston Moore apparently does not age, or lose his boyish awe.

At one point, he stopped the show to call attention to an audience members long hair. "What kind of shampoo do you use?" he asked with apparently genuine interest. "That's awesome. Long hair is so punk rock now. Isn't that weird?"

He later quipped that he was "half a century old" and had never had hair that long. Yeah, half a century old, and he still looks like he could be playing with JEFF in your basement this weekend.

Sonic Youth obviously don't think of themselves as a greatest-hits lounge act—their steady success has given them license to lean heavily on their most recent material with every tour. But they did break out "Bull in the Heather" off Experimental Jet Set, and what we could have sworn was the opening to "Teenage Riot" turned out to be Daydream Nation's " 'Cross the Breeze."

An encore brought Dirty's* "Drunken Butterfly," and a second encore brought "100%" from that same album. All in all, they owned the night, and even with a setlist light on nostalgia, the band proved you can still have a teenage riot at any age. And we totally bought a T-shirt.

*The original post incorrectly listed the song "Drunken Butterfly" as appearing on the album Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. It appears on Dirty.