On first flyover, Thurston Moore’s Rock N Roll Consciousness appears just as any song-based post-Sonic Youth album by Moore might, dotted with winding guitar trails and beatnik spoutings. But at ground level, Moore and his comrades find action. With a rhythm section of SY drummer Steve Shelley and My Bloody Valentine bassist Deb Googe, the sounds come in the familiar alt-shapes and colors of Moore’s long career and, at their best, remain surprising. On the album-highlighting “Cusp,” with Shelley’s unceasing snare at its center, Moore sings with his usual laconic calm—guitar figures exploring the dense rhythm like vines winding around a trellis—ending all tooquickly after six-and-a-half minutes. But just as often, as on the album-opening “Aphrodite,” barbed noise solos give way to the type of mystic ringing chords (perhaps in alternate tunings) found in Sonic Youth’s vocabulary. Predominantly, Moore stays in a mellow mood, with a pair of 10-minute-plus songs functioning as multi-section guitar jams punctuated by verses and occasional dramatic turns. What the album lacks in the explosive and inventive tension of Moore’s former band, it makes up for with the assurance of a musician further relaxing into the compositional voice he always had. And while broadcasting the radical poetry that Moore holds dear, Rock N Roll Consciousness comes across also as a consciousness of comfort, simultaneously a collection of attitudes and a legacy of solidarity in noise, ready to be cranked at first signs of trouble.