Sonic Youth are the latest band to sign up for the annual “Don’t Look Back” series of concerts in which artists are invited to perform, in full, an album of particular significance from their back catalogue. Who would have thought in 1988, when Daydream Nation peaked at No 99 in the UK chart (and failed to register at all in the American chart), that nearly 20 years later the album would be hailed universally as a 20th-century rock masterpiece?

Inducted last year into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry, and recently rereleased in a deluxe double-CD edition, this long, sprawling and frankly indigestible album has proved enduringly influential, importing avant-garde concepts of dissonance and atonal experimentation into the rock mainstream. And the promise of its live recreation was sufficiently appealing to sell out three nights at the 3,000-capacity Roundhouse.

Even more surprising than the longevity of the album is the continued existence of the group, given their wilfully iconoclastic approach. The enfants terribles of the 1980s looked in good shape as they ploughed into the opening tracks of the album.

The bass player, Kim Gordon, whippet-thin in a white summer dress, took the lead vocals on The Sprawl and Cross the Breeze, her breathless shout bobbing along faintly on top of a dense sheet of guitar noise underpinned by Steve Shelley’s furiously speedy drum patterns.

The guitarist Lee Ranaldo, looking like a college professor these days, picked up the vocal baton for Eric’s Tune, grappling with the indistinct lyric and nonexistent tune. Then it was the turn of Thurston Moore to sing the lead on Total Trash, a slower, more lumbering riff that disintegrated by incremental degrees into a blizzard of howling, feedback-drenched noise punctuated by a drunkenly staggering, free-time drumbeat. Still sporting his eternal student’s haircut, Moore bashed the body of his guitar, while Ranaldo pottered about with his foot pedals teasing out ever more extreme tones and sounds, as all four of them united in their attempt to create an aural landscape of nightmarish industrial noise.

There was something indubitably thrilling about the performance, rather like watching a volcano exploding or an avalanche of rocks tumbling down a mountain slope. And there was a palpable sense of occasion as they ended with Eliminator Jr, Gordon wailing like a cat with its tail caught in a lawnmower, over the brutal, scrubbing riff. A landmark album certainly, but not one you would necessarily be tempted to look back on too often.

— Tonight at the Roundhouse (Box office: 020-7424 9991)

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