Album Review: Kim Gordon – No Home Record

No Home Record is an appropriate title for the legendary Kim Gordon’s first solo record, writing in her memoir Girl In A Band that the place where she grew up, California, "is a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don’t realise deep down they’re actually afraid of what they want”.

Moving back from New York to the west coast to make the LP, the record too is dissonant, fractured, without a home. Yet at the same time it remains approachable as it sucks you into its depths. It’s an album of juxtaposition, of wanting that home but craving freedom. Both a political statement and personal offering, it burrows into your subconscious.

A nearly 40-year career has placed Gordon as one of the most visionary artists working today. From Sonic Youth to Body/Head, in her artwork and in her writing, she uses creation as a tool of resistance – resistance to modern life, resistance to the status quo, resistance to “faceless men” – a defiant, “You don’t own me,” ringing throughout. 

Pushing herself to create in new and exciting ways, this solo offering is familiar in its unfamiliarity. A dirge of truths relayed in her quintessential Downtown-New-York-cool way, Gordon’s poetry is the star, broadcast through a sketchy PA system in an industrial warehouse. Her words cut through the sonic glitches in a way only she can.