Kim Gordon isn't the only Sonic Youth co-leader who's about to put out a new album. Her ex-husband Thurston Moore recently teamed up with fellow underground veteran Bonner Kramer (formerly known as just plain Kramer) to record a mostly improvisational LP called They Came Like Swallows - Seven Requiems For The Children Of Gaza. We already posted that album's opener, the psychedelic instrumental freakout "Urn Burial." That album's closing track is out now, and it's a very different thing.
Moore and Kramer close out their new LP with a cover of Joy Division's 1979 Unknown Pleasures classic "Insight." Their version is hushed and almost reverent, with the two artists singing together in whispery unison. They've slowed the song down and allowed all this twinkly beauty in, which really highlights the sadness at the heart of it. Here's what Kramer says about it in a press release:
I clearly remember what I felt when I first heard track four of Unknown Pleasures. It was a masterpiece. A stroke of pure artistic genius. "Insight'"is a criminally under-appreciated tone poem; a benediction of loss, longing, and regret that still touches every cell in my body. It also features [Peter] Hook's finest bass guitar invention, singing to me like the sirens of Titan. I'd waited decades to "cover" this trembling ode to the curse of being human, waiting until I finally had the perfect partner to help me re-imagine it and make it new again. Thurston gave the music the gentle magic and unhurried cries Ian Curtis' words had always been screaming for, and singing it with him put me right back into that place, that feeling, that time when I first heard the sad pageantry of this tragic man's exquisite warning: "Time won't stop for you, or for anyone or anything. It owns us. Accept it, or be consumed by it."
And here's what Moore says:
Kramer had the idea to cover a Joy Division tune. It was a left turn from the improvisations we had been tracking, though wholly in keeping with both our sensibilities of light and dark unifying in transcendent songwriting, both of us devotees of "the song" as well as "the freedom."
Below, listen to Thurston Moore and Bonner Kramer's "Insight" cover, as well as the Joy Division original.
They Came Like Swallows - Seven Requiems For The Children Of Gaza is out 5/1 on Silver Currents.
