Music Review: Sonic Youth ACL Taping
Last night, veteran noise rockers Sonic Youth appeared on the Austin City Limits stage for the first time. With only a handful of tapings left in the KLRU campus studio before moving over to their new downtown digs, the venerable PBS series is hosting several performances in conjunction with this weekend's Austin City Limits Music Festival. The band was booked to play on the show last fall, but had to cancel the show and their festival appearance after guitarist Lee Renaldo fractured his wrist.
The energy in the crowd was palpable as the studio filled up about an hour before the band took the stage. It was definitely one of the more excitable audiences that we've seen in the KLRU studios in recent months. The band's set list was probably not all that different than what it would have been this time last year. More than half of what was performed was from last fall's album The Eternal.
The show kicked off with "Schizophrenia", digging back to their 1987 album Sister. Several of the other back-catalog tracks in the set were from 1988's groundbreaking Daydream Nation, one of the very few rock albums that is in the National Recording Registry at the Library Of Congress.
Kim Gordon was rather playful by the time they launched into "Sacred Trickster", the third song in their set. She jumped off the ACL stage and into the crowd, putting the microphone into the face of a rabid fan who was singing all the words. The camera crew scrambled to keep her in focus as she clearly strayed from rehearsal. It will be interesting to see if that moment makes the final broadcast, but there should be a pretty great overhead crane shot to use if it does.
Overall, they ended up playing 14 songs for an almost 80-minute set to an incredibly gracious crowd. The entire performance will be edited down and split in an episode on January 22, 2011 with The Black Keys (who are taping later this weekend).
