The most surprising thing about YOKOKIMTHURSTON is that it took until 2012 to happen. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon have long been vocal cheerleaders for #TeamYoko, whether enlisting their daughter Coco to "cover" one of Ono's earliest scream experiments ("Voice Piece for Soprano") on 1999's SYR 4: Goodbye 20th Century, or penning fan-letters-as-song ("Ono Soul", from Moore's 1995 solo effort, Psychic Hearts), even though they don't seem to be big fans of Double Fantasy. Ono, for her part, has welcomed interaction with her various alt-rock progeny-- most notably on 2007's indie star-studded remix collection Yes I'm a Witch-- but the fact that an artist who averages a couple of new albums per decade has devoted a full-length collaboration to Kim and Thurston suggests that indie rock's perennial power couple must hold a special place in her heart. After all, what are Sonic Youth if not the modern manifestation of the avant/rock ideal that Yoko and her late husband John Lennon forged with Plastic Ono Band-- a symbolic, spiritual kinship reinforced by the fact that Sonic Youth played their first gig, in the East Village, mere months after Lennon's murder uptown.
But if a collaboration between these three was inevitable, its timing is uncanny: It represents Moore and Gordon's first musical release together since announcing their separation after 27 years of marriage. While it would be overly presumptuous to believe that Moore and Gordon's union here has any bearing on the future of their relationship, it's heartening that they've chosen to spend this moment of their lives with Ono, a woman who understands all too well the difficult dance between creativity and matrimony. As such, YOKOKIMTHURSTON is not so much a decibel-bursting showcase for the Queen of Noise and her unruly understudies as a conversation between intimates speaking in tongues and tangles-- a voyeuristic glimpse into a private, discomfiting exchange.
To underscore the clandestine nature of this meeting and instantly ward off casual onlookers, Ono spends the first two minutes of opener "I Missed You Listening" demonstrating the entire emotional range of her voice-- from baby-cute cooing to demon-possessed laughter to orgasmic ecstasy to the panic-attack terror of someone whose anesthetic has worn off mid-surgery. It's a move that immediately establishes the album's lawless environment. But, as the song jabbers past the nine-minute mark without introducing any significant changes, you realize the philosophy here is one of understated anarchy.
Composed mainly of Ono's instinctual reactions to Gordon and Moore's spidery guitar scrapes, and of Ono's hushed, spoken-word interactions with Gordon-- YOKOKIMTHURSTON feels both exhaustively sprawling and claustrophobically hermetic. Its six tracks average 10 minutes each, but don't so much chart an evolutionary course as stubbornly linger on a sensation of creeping unease. Even as the album turns considerably noisier and gnarlier in its final two pieces (the tortured mantra "Let's Get There" and the 14-minute apocalypse "Early in the Morning"), there's little in the way of release or resolution; it's the same sense of stasis projected on a louder, uglier scale. That said, the latter track acquires something resembling a dramatic arc if you interpret Gordon's repeated gnashed-teeth grunts of "my townhouse!"-- and Ono's horrified reactions to them-- as a comment on the price of an Upper West Side brownstone.
These vague conceptual cues are all you have to work with in trying to comprehend the purpose of these pieces. The rare moments of clarity announce themselves with all the subtlety of a title card in a silent film: amid the hysterical shrieks of "I Missed You, Listening", Ono pauses to advise us, in rather self-explanatory fashion, "trust your intuition." But even some clearly spoken passages take time to reveal their logic: "Running the Risk" begins with the trio playing word-association with newspaper headlines as if engaged in some after-dinner party game but, as the contrast between Moore and Gordon's tabloid-worthy one-liners ("GOPs abandon babies," "It's all about the party," "secrets from a stylist") and Ono's more worldly concerns ("the biggest fish face a little risk… of being cooked") becomes increasingly apparent, the piece comes to encapsulate how frivolous chatter often drowns out serious discourse in our 140-character universe.
Likewise, the hindsight significance of Moore and Gordon's participation in this project (which was recorded months before their split was made public) overshadows the real rocky-romance story of this album: that of Ono's relationship with her muse, which remains stormy even as she approaches her 80th birthday. It's all laid bare in centerpiece track "Mirror Mirror", in which Ono fesses up to her imperfections and insecurities while Gordon gives a disembodied but reassuring voice to the reflection staring back at her, their eerie exchanges playing out over Moore's deceptively serene psych-folk strums. At the track's outset, Ono plainly admits, "I'm an intrinsically nervous person, I'm nervous every day, every minute... but at the same time, I am an extremely relaxed person. Every day, every minute, I love being daring." YOKOKIMTHURSTON is nothing if not a noble but exceedingly arduous attempt to translate that perpetual state of splendid agitation into sound.