Where career-spanning setlists from most veteran bands will inevitably succumb to wild variances in tone if not quality, Live in Brooklyn 2011 dissolves three decades into a holistic 17-track noise opera that enshrines Sonic Youth’s greatest attributes and contradictions: a band that dipped its toes into the alt-rock mainstream without ever planting their feet in it, who rose to amphitheater-headliner status while routinely disavowing the old showbiz maxim of giving the people what they want. The Brooklyn set forsakes the band’s most popular songs to illuminate the darker corners of their discography and build bridges between them. The show came at the tail end of the promotional campaign for what would be Sonic Youth’s final official full-length, 2009’s The Eternal, but the album that dominates the setlist is, fittingly, Bad Moon Rising—the record that first pushed them out of New York and onto the American indie frontlines, and which, here, symbolizes both a homecoming and full-circle farewell. And if that significance wasn’t known to the Williamsburg crowd that night, a rare, complementary airing of 1983’s caterwauling “Kill Yr Idols” feels like a coded, foreshadowing communique.
Thanks to the undiminished intensity of drummer Steve Shelley and the steely rhythmic pulse of latter-day bassist Mark Ibold, the back-to-back Bad Moon Rising bookends “Brave Men Run (In My Family)” and “Death Valley ’69” absolutely clobber where they used to clang, making them natural companions to Lee Ranaldo’s signature psych-out “Eric’s Trip,” the rocket-launching glam noise of 1994’s “Starfield Road,” and the untamed thrust of The Eternal’s “Calming the Snake.” But the connections being drawn here are as much lyrical as they are musical, with Gordon’s ’85-era mantra “Flower,” Dirty’s sardonic Heart homage “Drunken Butterfly,” and The Eternal’s eye-rolling “Sacred Trickster” foregrounding the feminist fury that courses through the entire Sonic Youth canon, and which acquires an even more acerbic edge when you consider the dysfunctional dynamics Gordon was grappling with at the time. (The latter song’s sarcastic quip—“What’s it like being a girl in a band?”—takes on a whole new discomfiting dimension when you know she’s singing it alongside her soon-to-be ex as the ship’s going down.)
At the end of the show’s first encore, Sonic Youth make an uncharacteristic concession to popular taste by trotting out the beloved Dirty warhorse “Sugar Kane,” whose Marc Jacobs/Chloë Sevigny-festooned video proved to be the high-water mark of the band’s early-’90s crossover. The song’s atypical appearance amid a setlist filled with the deepest of deep cuts underscores the sheer improbability of these avant-rock radicals becoming momentary MTV stars. The group’s contrarian essence is further epitomized by the second encore, where Sonic Youth deliver their first-ever performance of the locomotive, Velvets-esque title track to Moore’s 1995 solo album Psychic Hearts—a move that, in retrospect, points the way to the sort of taut and tuneful jams he would later pursue with the Thurston Moore Group.