I've been enjoying Thurston Moore's 2020 album By The Fire recently, a double vinyl nine track record. Four of the tracks are really long- Breath is over ten minutes, Siren over twelve, Venus thirteen and Locomotives over sixteen. Around these lengthy guitar and electronics with voice songs are some shorter ones. Deb Googe plays bass ad ex- Sonic youth drummer Steve Shelley appears on Breath. Side One has two superb songs- the second is Cantaloupe, a heavy guitar tune with sludgy riffs and psychedelic fireworks, Thurston singing like it's late 1969, coming back to the refrain, 'white gardenias in your eyessssss'. Thurston's guitar solo is totally Hendixian.
Before that is By The Fire's opening song Hashish- a slow burning introduction to the sound of the album, Television guitars and Black Sabbath riffing, more than a dash of Thurston's ex- band Sonic Youth and nicely ragged, drawled vocals.
Hashish is partly inspired by Arthur Rimbaud's 'derangement of the senses' and partly by Thurston's desire to present love as a narcotic state of being. 'Smoke it and see', he advises.
Three years before By The Fire Thurston released Rock n Roll Consciousness which was led by the song Smoke Of Dreams.
Two guitars, one spindly and Sonic Youth- esque, the other a Neil Young style topline. Steve Shelley is there on drums again and Thurston sings softly. It's got a studio jam looseness, sounds live and like it was done in one take, Thurston drifting back through four decades of music making, sifting through the embers.
Andrew Weatherall died in February 2020. Not long after a series of YouTube playlists came to light, Andrew's late night song selections, known as The Black Notebooks. There's a comprehensive post about them at Ban Ban Ton Ton. One of the songs in one of Andrew's black notebooks included was Smoke Of Dreams.
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