Week in Rock: Boys & Girls Edition

Moment of Youth

Sometimes the dynamite is all loaded in the mine shaft, but the fuse just doesn't light. Such was the case at last Friday's Sonic Youth gig at the massive United Palace Theater, way up in the Yukon Territory of Washington Heights. You can't really call it an off night for the band—the sound was fine from our orchestra seats, the material well-rehearsed—but for some reason they didn't achieve liftoff until the encore, when frontman Thurston Moore urged the audience to leave the holding pen of their assigned seats and fill in the yawning, stultifying gap between the front row and the stage. The next half hour felt like Sonic Youth as Mother Nature intended; exhilarating, dense, weird, and sometimes recklessly propulsive. Smiling out at the crowd suddenly pressing against the stage, guitarist Lee Ranaldo twice remarked, "Ah, this is much better!"

But given the vast distances many of us had to travel—uphill, on the subway, both ways!—the juicy encore wasn't quite enough to compensate for the rather perfunctory first hour. The band is rightfully enjoying the cuts off their solid new album "The Eternal," and much of the material, like "Anti-Orgasm" and "Calming the Snake," really packs a wallop. (Live, some of it still feels a bit too tidy.) Maybe the show's undermining factor came from the old songs chosen to counterbalance the new material: weren't they maybe a tad too old to whip the 3,000-plus house into much of a frenzy? Or maybe it was just the orchestra section that was subdued. Unleashing a better-known classic like "Silver Rocket" might have done the trick, but Moore didn't bother consulting us on the set list (here). — John Del Signore