Thurston Moore has returned to the band dynamic once again. Since Sonic Youth parted ways in 2011, Moore has been involved in a plethora of collaborations as well as releasing his third solo album ‘Demolished Thoughts’. With Chelsea Light Moving he has been subsumed into a group once again, joined here by guitarist Keith Wood, and Samara Lubelski – who played on Moore’s previous two solo efforts – on bass. Manning the drumstool is John Moloney, with whom Moore released the recent ‘Caught On Tape’, a record that documented their experimental, improvisational two-man tour of Europe last year.

‘Chelsea Light Moving’ isn’t far removed from the Moore/Moloney collaboration in its execution. It’s an album that sees Moore return to an abrasive hardcore sound that reads as an ode to literature, to the Beats, and to William Burroughs most overtly. The album can easily be taken as a musical interpretation of the literary ‘cut up’ technique closely associated with Burroughs, where a piece of writing is cut up and then re-arranged to create a new text and meaning. In fact Moore makes this explicit on Lip, and on Empires Of Time – “We are the third mind of rock’n’roll” – referencing the 1977 Burroughs and Brion Gysin collection ‘The Third Mind’.

Lyrically Moore seems more concerned with the flow and sound of language than any kind of clear narrative, with the singer spitting out alliterative rhymes and couplets, or emphasising the repetition of certain phrases within songs. This repetition informs the music as well – tempos switch from lumbering riffs into double-time punk rushes and back, within songs and over the record, giving it an overall loose cohesion. On Lip, Moore machine-guns the clipped, concise rhymes, building to a repeated crescendo of “Too fucking bad!” before the guitar solo meanders all over the scales.

Alighted begins from a simple four-note riff that immediately bristles, lurching into a grimy, metal-riffing rock-out. This instrumental first half of the song over, Moore channels Iggy Pop as the band hangs back once again – “I come to get alighted/ I come to get ignited/ I come to get divided/ I come to get wasted”. Off-kilter guitars lead to a cymbal spattering, imploding distortion breakdown before that Cyclopean riff rises from the ashes once more and gathers force towards the song’s climax. Burroughs is a similarly arresting high point, again demonstrating that repeated dichotomy of a lurching half-time riff that suddenly erupts. The song barrels forward in a squall of ascending/descending abrasion before reverting to its “Hey Billy…” entreaties.

While musically a re-imagining of Illuminine from ‘Demolished Thoughts’, Frank O’Hara Hit is the most coherent narrative on album, detailing temporally-separated events occurring around the day of the death of the Baltimore poet of the title (killed a by a dune buggy in 1966). Events in the lives of Jagger and Dylan are referenced, before scathing guitars lead to four crashing knells mid-song. In an album where Moore’s more experimental fretwork fires off Wood’s, things wind down noisily with Mowhawk. Moore’s spoken word intones over an austere guitar line and chipped hi-hat, before a siren-like wail floats on top, the experimental drone of strings and guitars bringing things to a close.

With Moore’s literary preoccupations in mind, ‘Chelsea Light Moving’ is certainly an interesting experiment, if it’s intended as a conceptual interpretation of a literary movement and device i.e. Beat literature and the cut up technique – the ubiquitous fast/slow dynamic where certain song segments could be interchangeable with others on the album; the scattershot rhyming; the deconstructed, electrified and re-defined Illumine/Frank O’Hara Hit. Of course, if this isn’t the case then it’s just a repetitive, uninspired run-through of rock’s heavier milieu. As simply a collection of songs, a loose template seems to pervade where things accelerate and decelerate, the band winding up from grinding Sabbath riffs to hardcore pummeling and back, adorned with the guitarist’s always-interesting sonic deviations. Primarily though, it’s a return to atonal noise rock for Moore after his more restrained solo work and for the most part, it’s a glorious noise.