Month: November 2023

And here’s a man with a lust for life, he lives for now on the edge of a knife – Five From Thurston Moore

/ Tony / 1 Comment

Thurston Moore – erstwhile founder and guitar wrangler, singer etc of Sonic Youth – has been popping up a fair bit on my news feed of late. He’s got a memoir out (which I look forward to reading) and as a health issue has limited his physical wandering to promote it, there’s no shortage of interview opportunities to do so. 

Along with his former band’s work, Thurston’s solo work has proven a strong mainstay in my collection and I always enjoy slapping on one of his albums. In the same manner that his band used to straddle both the alt-rock and avant-garde worlds, Moore’s solo work has swung from one to the other with an array of noise-based, experimental recordings across a myriad of labels and outputs as well as a now seven album long roster of song-based projects of which those recorded with the ‘Thurston Moore Group’ probably lean as close to the Sonic Youth ‘sound’ as we’re likely to get since that band’s move to inactivity in 2011.

While there are certainly some elements of his less song-based stuff worth checking out – if you’re curious I’d recommend 2021’s Screen Time and 12 String Meditations for Jack Rose (Moore’s tribute to that mighty of drone musicians) – I thought it worth tipping the proverbial to a smattering of his solo catalogue…

Frozen GTR

While Moore’s first solo album Psychic Hearts was very much a snapshot of mid-’90s Sonic Youth in sound, his second song-based solo album Trees Outside of the Academy felt wrapped more around acoustics – save for the odd searing lead laid down by J Mascis whose studio the 2007 album was recorded in. The album has long been a favourite of mine, it’s a decidedly warm sounding album and showcases Moore’s ability to create hypnotic acoustic rhythms. 

Benediction

Following the acoustic-leanings of his previous solo effort, Demolished Thoughts was produced and assisted by Beck in his more folk-pastoral mode with splashings of harp and violins adding to the album’s delicate lushness. Unfortunately, according to Kim Gordon’s ‘Girl In A Band’, Thurston realised that most of the songs on it were about ‘the other woman’ and so it was buried. Twelve years on and with Mr Moore now married to the presumed subject of these songs it’s worth a revisit without the baggage, right?

Forevermore

With Sonic Youth on hiatus, Moore’s first rebound effort came via the short-live, punkier edged Chelsea Light Moving. When he next emerged with an album in his own name it was 2014’s The Best Day which also marked the first effort of his Thurston Moore Group which featured My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Googe on bass, James Sedwards trading guitar licks and Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley on drums. The Best Day feels like a statement of intent as well as a great collection of tunes and ‘Forevermore’ bristles along with a real thump and kick across it’s eleven minutes that manages to combine Moore’s penchant for sprawling guitar epics with his ability to craft a real driving hook.

Smoke of Dreams

While <The Best Day leant to SY and Thurston’s harder-driving sound, for 2017’s Rock n Roll Consciousness he, and the Thurston Moore Group, paired with producer Paul Epworth – yep, he of Adele, Rhianna and Florence and the Machine work – for an album the delved into the gentler, hippy-like side to Thurston Moore’s writing. Yes there are noisy, bouncing guitar jams but there’s more of the softer side with some real optimism in the lyrics.

Hashish

By The Fire – so called because it’s “the idea of people sitting around a fire and dialoguing” – is the Thurston Moore lockdown record, if there’s such a thing. Finished and released in 2020 while Moore was coming off the back of the Spirit Counsel project, By The Fire feels like a glorious melding of that project’s experimental leanings to Moore’s riff and song-based work in a way that his solo work to date hadn’t really managed

The Fascination by Essie Fox

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From the PR: “Victorian England. A world of rural fairgrounds and glamorous London theatres. A world of dark secrets and deadly obsessions…

Twin sisters Keziah and Tilly Lovell are identical in every way, except that Tilly hasn’t grown a single inch since she was five. Coerced into promoting their father’s quack elixir as they tour the country fairgrounds, at the age of fifteen the girls are sold to a mysterious Italian known as `Captain´.

Theo is an orphan, raised by his grandfather, Lord Seabrook, a man who has a dark interest in anatomical freaks and other curiosities … particularly the human kind. Resenting his grandson for his mother’s death in childbirth, when Seabrook remarries and a new heir is produced, Theo is forced to leave home without a penny to his name.

Theo finds employment in Dr Summerwell’s Museum of Anatomy in London, and here he meets Captain and his theatrical ‘family’ of performers, freaks and outcasts.

But it is Theo’s fascination with Tilly and Keziah that will lead all of them into a web of deceits, exposing the darkest secrets and threatening everything they know…

Exploring universal themes of love and loss, the power of redemption and what it means to be unique, The Fascination is an evocative, glittering and bewitching gothic novel that brings alive Victorian London – and darkness and deception that lies beneath…”

I know they say you should never judge a book by its cover but I’ve got a feeling that’s a load of tosh, there are some great novels on my shelves with covers that are just as glorious and Essie Fox’s The Fascination has joined that list, it’s a stunner inside and out.

I tend to be wary of historical novels, I find the notion of characters within pages set, for example, in the time of Henry VIII behaving or using phraseology too close to the time they were written vs the time they supposedly inhabit, especially when we have literary touch points from that time that are more likely to be accurate in that respect. Perhaps its because I studied the era and its literature (specifically that of crime and law) at university, I’m typically less forgiving of novels set within the Victorian era that find characters either cliched or as historically convincing as Ben Affleck in, well, anything other than a meme.

With that preamble out of the way… how do I feel about The Fascination? I bloody loved it. Essie Fox’s novel feels like a delicious example of that classic Victorian narrative that made the era and genre so ripe and important. From the syntax to the characters, their clothing and actions and presentation, The Fascination is so immersive and richly of its time you’d be forgiven for doubting it was published in 2023.

More than managing the tricky feat of creating an accurate setting in time, Essie Fox’s novel also delivers a compelling and, if you’ll pardon the pun, fascinating storyline that’s loaded with mystery, suspense and underpinned with a whole lot of heart.

While the principal trio of Keziah, Tilly and Theo deservedly evoke plenty of emotion (the twins’ early years are rendered so heartbreakingly), they’re supported by a bevvy of characters that are painted with similarly sympathetic colours and attention to detail, providing the emotional warmth of the novel even as it treads into some seriously grim and dark waters.

Those dark waters do get pretty disturbing too… it’s to Fox’s credit that she manages to convey those horrors so vividly while still maintaining the feeling that you’re reading a classic Victorian novel. As thrilling as some of those moments get, I think it’s fair to say that The Fascination is more an enthralling mystery than it is a thriller and there are some genuine surprises in store as its different threads come together – indeed, the very last one was one that left my mouth agape and made me go back and double check I’d read it correctly.

The Fascination is rich in detail, overflowing with brilliant characters and reading like a true classical Victorian novel and wholeheartedly recommended.