Sonic Youth’s Noise Is a Sound Thing of Beauty

Too often in rock, artists who have clocked more than two decades as performers settle into a creative torpor, killing time with repeated exhumations of their past glory.

New York’s Sonic Youth takes the opposite tack, obstinately refusing to tidy up its noisy rock for easy consumption, even as it’s leaned closer to conventional pop song forms over the past decade. At the Wilshire Theatre on Monday, the band ranged across different tones and timbres, but everything was hard-wired into waves of warped noise.

Like a great abstract painter who keeps his art grounded in solid technique, Sonic Youth can move from the linear to the abstract without losing the thread of an idea. The band chipped away at its sound sculptures, literally: Guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo raked and bashed their strings with drumsticks, and bassist Kim Gordon did the same with a trumpet--until they reached the quiet center of a riff or a motif that launched another song.

Auxiliary guitarist Jim O’Rourke, a major figure in Chicago’s avant-rock circles, made for an ideal fellow traveler, contributing slashing sound effects and bass parts when Gordon switched to guitar. When O’Rourke, Ranaldo and Moore joined finger-boards in an orgy of string scraping, it made perfect sense.