It's been 12 years since Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore released a solo work - 1995's "Psychic Heart" - but much like Dave Grohl, Thurston is not leading an idle life between tours and recordings with his full time band. Among one of his many admirable endeavors is running his own website, Protest records - which is devoted to overturning existing music anti-piracy laws. He's been in countless super-star collective collaborations (including one with the afore mentioned Grohl - with whom he wrote and recorded the music soundtrack for the movie Backbeat along with members from R.E.M. and Afghan Whigs.

Working from longtime friend J. Mascis' (of Dinosaur Jr.) home studio, and featuring a small group of collaborators including Mascis, SY's Steve Shelley on drums and violinist/solo artist Samara Lubelski, this certainly isn't the Thurston solo effort fans would hope for, but it's the one we get, and we should love it as such. "Psychic Hearts" was a spotty effort, featuring one of Thurston's best ever songs (the title track), and a lot of half baked efforts that grew out of the kind of songs the mothership band were doing at the time. The new album, therefore, will appeal to fans of recent SY albums such as Rather Ripped: that is, song-based rather than jammy, with strong melodies. Here Thurston is mainly playing acoustic guitar, but the songwriting is still clearly his, right down to the time changes. On a number of songs, J. Mascis does step in with his usual fiery electric guitar playing, so noise hasn't been abandoned altogether. There are moments here as bracing as anything in SY's cataologue, but they're balanced against moments of equal beauty and delicacy. The instrumental "Off Work" is case in point-Thurston plays the melody lines on acoustic, Mascis plays noisy counterpoint on electric, while Lubelski's violin adds in plenty of color. Much of the rest of the album, in particular the soft, straightforward "Never Day," establish Thurston as a singer-songwriter trapped in an indie rocker's body. This is again balanced with occasional outbursts of white noise, such as the 37-second "Free Noise Among Friends," and the closing instrumental of the title track, which uses the full band dynamic to build into a compressed (despite a 6 minute running time) head of steam. It should also be noted that Shelley's drumming on the album differs a bit from his SY work-an often motorik method cleary taken from so-called Krautrock bands like Can. The end result of the album is thrilling-even if one were to ignore Moore's long resume, this would still be one of the best of the year.

The closer, allegedly "hidden" track, "Thurston @ 13," is an old tape recovered from his parent's house featuring a young Thurston (though his voice had obviously changed by this point) playing around with various sounds-"What you are about to hear is me dropping a quarter on the table...there." What should be a somewhat embarrassing bit of juvenalia is, in the context of the album and Thurston's career in general, a curious and playful sxploration of sound itself. "Trees,,," shows him at the current summit of his exploring, and proves that he's far from finished yet.

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