With Sonic Youth’s fate still up in the air, Thurston Moore’s new band Chelsea Light Moving has returned with another song that carries on in the New York band’s downtown art-squall legacy. After the helter-skelter six minutes of first track “Burroughs,” the group’s latest is more restrained, but no less bleakly seething. Again deploying Keith Wood on guitar, Samara Lubelski on bass, and John Moloney on drums, “Groovy & Linda” draws lyrical inspiration from the late-’60s East Village hippie couple whose flower-power dreams ended in a grisly double homicide. In contrast with folkie Tom Parrott’s dewy-eyed 1968 paean of almost the exact same title, which tragicomically compares the crash-pad-hosting pair to Jesus (“though they shun the Christian name”), Chelsea Light Moving’s tightly coiled take hints at the looming menace that came to fruition with Charles Manson and Altamont. “Don’t shoot / We are your children,” Moore speak-sings, in a wonderfully ambiguous near-purr. It’s enough to make you jealous of the audiences that got to share in the peace and love during the band’s just-completed four-date U.S.-Canada tour.
Download “Groovy & Linda” from Matador here.
