Thurston Moore – Flow Critical Lucidity

★★☆

Released September 20th, 2024 on Daydream Library

Experimentation, yeah yeah yeah. Sonic Youth had it in spades; the band seemed to run on nothing but. The word isn’t the equivalent of ‘good’, though, by any stretch. Flow Critical Lucidity experiments, but does that experimentation pay off?

The part of Moore’s work I’ve always liked the best has been his ability to shape and control guitar feedback like a Ghostbuster wielding a proton pack. There’s always been something incredibly free about listening to him create whole soundscapes out of it. There’s some of that on Flow Critical Lucidity but precious little, at the final count. What there is instead is a whole lot of texture. It’s an album of overlapping textures. That’s the good part. Most of these textures are underwhelming, though. There is a muted loneliness to the sounds that Moore sculpts together. Underneath all of the krautrock drumming, entwinted guitar-and-synth work, and post-grunge vibe scaffoldings is an emptiness.

The problem is restraint – an odd thing to say about an album, but with a guy whose dealt in freewheeling noise for much of his career, restraint just makes things seem truncated. The music rises to the level of okay and then stalls. It’s the sort of stuff that you nod along to and say “hmm that’s interesting” even though, deep down, it’s not interesting at all. It’s interesting at first listen and then drips away. There are good ideas in here and, to be charitable, if this is the first of an ever-deepening series of explorations of this sort of pseudo-psych prog jammery then maybe Moore is in good shape. As a standalone, though, it lacks.

It’s a shame, since his ex-wife and former bandmate Kim Gordon also did some experimentation this year and far outstripped Thurston’s efforts here. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I just want a second Chelsea Light Moving record. But as far as Flow Critical Lucidity goes, it’s so lucid it barely holds my attention.