Moore unplugs, turns on

Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore has long betrayed a refined and expressive songwriting bent that, in SY’s live performances at least, is often crushed beneath the band’s crowd-pleasing onslaughts of harsh guitar noise and punky manic force. Moore’s more artfully musical side, however, has dominated SY’s ever more wistfully autumnal albums of the last few years, and he’s given this facet free reign on his recent solo disc, “Trees Outside of the Acade- my.”

Somewhat ironically, Moore’s showcase for the new material Wednesday night at the Echoplex largely bypassed “Trees’ ” minutely detailed aural charms trying to demonstrate that acoustic guitars can indeed wreak as much hellish havoc as their plugged-in cousins.

The floppy-haired, ageless Moore laid out the album’s lyrically reflective and down-to-earth musical vibe in his amiable but businesslike set. Yet an adrenaline-charged Moore and his band (including SY drummer Steve Shelley) muscled up the album’s mid-tempo and finely shaded songs, even on the loping, Velvet-y “Frozen Gtr” and the sweetly upbeat “Fri/End.”

Noticeably missing were Moore’s signature odd guitar tunings; while the dissonance and clashing harmonics that characterize much of his SY work eventually made their presence felt, for the most part they were hinted at or implied within Moore’s simple song forms.

There was a certain further irony in Moore’s set that when he emerged for an encore, he and second guitarist Chris Brokaw were armed with electric guitars for a quartet of songs that blew all the acoustic stuff that had come before clear out of the room.

Opening the show was Scorces, the duo of electric slide guitarist Christina Carter and lap-steel player Heather Leigh Murray, whose prolonged miasmas of improvised vocalese and heavily reverbed strings sounded like the end of the world.