Sonic Youth, “Live In Brooklyn 2011.”

Sonic Youth was my generation’s Camelot. Too young to see Kennedy in the White House, our fin de siècle kingdom was a prolific noise band helmed by grunge’s ultimate power couple, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. The band meant a lot of things to me: that noise could be art, that art could be cool and that cool people could find one another and carve out the narrowest of niches, where they could live out their lives untrammeled by the coarseness of the world.

Instead, Moore and Gordon went the way of my parents: divorced. And our family was never the same. So in some sense, Sonic Youth’s new live recording of its last show, Live in Brooklyn, recorded in 2011, feels a little like the Zapruder footage. The album captures the final moments of a magical time in history.

The most notable thing about Sonic Youth’s latest unvaulting is the wealth of old material the band revisits during the 17-song set. The quartet plays almost all of its 1985 masterpiece, Dead Moon Rising. Songs like “Brave Men Run” and “Ghost Bitch” are played with the same punk abandon they were given birth to in the 1980s. Both renditions feature extended noise sections that sound like everything from silverware in a blender to Eddie Van Halen on horse tranquilizers.

But Sonic Youth’s message hasn’t changed: that noise is beautiful music if we can just loosen up our definitions a little bit.

Only a few songs on the setlist were composed and released after Y2K. A trio of songs from 2009’s The Eternal break up the old hits and deep cuts that comprise the lion’s share of the set.

“Sacred Trickster” begins with dueling atonal guitars; picture Zappa and company playing the banjoes in the movie “Deliverance.” Just before launching into “What We Know,” Moore informs the audience that “Later on tonight, a large rattlesnake head is going to come over New York, over the river, and introduce us to 2012.” An attendee can be heard asking, incredulously, “Spraying LSD?” to which Moore responds, “Yes, it’s gonna spray LSD like angel dust and then we’ll all become women.”

During the encore, before launching into “Inhuman” from 1985’s(!) Confusion is Sex, Moore regales the audience with recollections of growing up in Connecticut.

“It’s the nutmeg state,” he explains, before noting some sort of technical glitch by saying, “It’s got no jack.” After a moment’s pause, Moore adds, “Jack Spicer,” name-checking the obscure Bay Area Beatnik poet.

Man, I miss this band.

The evening’s most ironic moment comes when Moore and Gordon sing “Kotton Krown” from 1987 album Sister together.

“Love has come to stay in all the way/ It’s gonna stay forever and everyday/ It feels like a wish coming true/ It feels like an angel dreaming of you,” the soon-to-split couple sings.

Many of the songs function as vehicles for extended, improvised noise sections. Sometimes the noise serves as two pieces of bread sandwiching a long and substantive noise excursion; other times the noise bookends the song, punctuating the beginning and end with sonic chaos.

While we may not be able to go back in time, Sonic Youth continues to remind us exactly how good it was at what it did.

Follow writer David Gill at Twitter.com/songotaku.