Not All Bands Act Like It’s Party Time

At one point during Sonic Youth’s set, which closed the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival at UCLA’s Ackerman Grand Ballroom on Sunday, strobe-light shadows of the amps on a screen behind the stage resembled the pre-Sept. 11 New York skyline.

Later, as the New York band--which curated the wide-ranging, four-day festival--engaged in a signature noise excursion to conclude a song, the cacophony seemed to echo emergency alarms and the scraping of collapsing metal.

Those may have been accidental allusions. But there was no mistaking the impact of the World Trade Center attacks on the new songs that made up the bulk of the influential outfit’s 90-minute performance.

Specific references were but shadows and shards in the lyrics. Little this band has done in its 20-year career has ever been prosaic or explicit. Yet proximity to the tragedy seems to have given the group new clarity, focus and grounding.

Songs premiered Sunday--ranging from guitarist Thurston Moore’s “Disconnection Notes,” about displacement, to the punk-toned “Plastic Sun,” sung by bassist Kim Gordon-- were marked by a new sense of directness of emotion and even warmth. And the noise/atmosphere passages contained a new sense of beauty and increased nuance and control, without losing any of the sense of adventure that has been integral to the band’s music. Where much WTC-related art has been saccharine or hokey, the sound sculptures Sonic Youth created Sunday were both haunting and exhilarating.

As curators, the group members had assured that the rest of Sunday’s closing concert would have the same sense of purpose. There’s little fault to find in Sonic Youth’s bookings for All Tomorrow’s Parties--an eclectic array of often challenging acts, which on Sunday ranged from the feedback manipulation of Australian trio Dead C to the sexually provocative, low-tech performance art of Peaches.

But for the most part, the acts simply played their usual sets and gave little air of occasion to their appearances. No one in an event like this should do anything expected, but should rise to the occasion and present something unique.

One thread that did run through some of the day was a sort of ad-hoc reunion of artists associated with SST Records, the Los Angeles label that was at the forefront of the pre-Nirvana alternative rock movement. It was Sonic Youth’s home through most of the ‘80s, and the band brought fellow SST alums Saccharine Trust and Mike Watt onto the bill.

The former, re-formed five years ago by founding singer Jack Brewer and guitarist Joe Baiza, pushed forward its high-precision, edge-skirting mesh of neo-Beat poetry and angular, jazz-rooted music.

Bassist Watt paid tribute to punk progenitors with a spirited series of songs originated by such acts as the Velvet Underground, Wire, Television and Watt’s own former band the Minutemen.

The best set Sunday other than Sonic Youth’s, though, may have been from Peaches. While her willfully semiprofessional, sexually frank hip-hop persona is entertaining in itself, the show incorporated cartoonish art “performed” live by Shary Boyle on an overhead projector, often incorporating the live, posing Peaches into the art on the screen.

Maybe next year they could try an entire evening of overhead projector art--anything to transcend the hodgepodge nature of the festival.