Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth (Olympia Theatre, Dublin)

These forefathers of grunge, have now been together for 17 years. Put into perspective that is my entire life so far. For bands at this stage, there are two ways to go: embark on an orgy of knob-twiddling, pseudo-musing, studio self-indulgence, or a more evolved level of music; both in recording and sheer live power.

They treated their guitars as if they were dough, them being the cocks in the mother of all bad moods – string-yanking, pick-up pounding and fret-groping being the dish of the day. Sonic Youth don’t play their instruments they thrash them.

Out of these cacophonic conglomerations came sudden respites for the eardrums. These were in the shape of ‘Wildflour Soul’ and ‘Hits of Sunshine’, but then before you knew it the spliffed-out melodies would give way for another blinding burst of grating guitars. One disadvantage to this was the drowning of the lyrics (one of the most intriguing factors in their current long-player, A Thousand Leaves) by the pure energy of the music. This is the kind of music your parents would call noise, but experienced live it makes every muscle in you tighten in derangement.

After clawing at his strings as if they were garottes around his very own neck, Ranaldo accomplished playing the guitar with his ass, and then a front stage cabinet. Not to be out-done, Moore, taking a violinits’s bow to his own Strat accompanied and heightened the violent echoes of a voice-box.

This kind of captured dementia is exactly why Sonic Youth are stunned by the pop-mainstream, this incoherent genius of it all only recognisable to true music lovers. Ranaldo managed to summarise his band precisely while describing some of his equipment: “the blue box has no rhyme nor reason, therefore it is a thing of beauty.”

One of the finest live performances I’ve ever seen. Sonic Youth are the future through the past.

• Cian Doherty