The solo discography of Sonic Youth co-founder Thurston Moore is littered with limited run work released on small indie labels amid his more blue chip LPs like Psychic Hearts and Demolished Thoughts. This 1995 recording of the guitarist making a free form racket with drummer Tom Surgal, for example, was originally issued only on CD in New Zealand by Bruce Russell of The Dead C. Did this need to be brought to a larger audience by U.K. label Glass Modern on a white vinyl pressing? Maybe not but we should still celebrate it.
Moore is as great an improviser as he is a songwriter and this explosive session is all the proof you’ll need of that. He sticks to a series of ringing tones, peppered with small sprays of feedback that builds and recedes with intensity as the mood and Surgal’s drums strike him. By the end, during the closing piece “Phase II,” he’s releasing little notes and squalls while the drums take control and drive them both toward infinity. Follow them into the light, brothers and sisters.
An extract from the Glass Modern Vinyl Reissue. First time on Vinyl. Originally released on CD only in New Zealand by the Dead C’s Bruce Russel’s label Corpus Hermeticum. New Liner notes by Bruce Russel too. “A 1995 release from the famed Sonic Youth guitarist, this recording sees him paired with free jazz drummer Tom Surgal for a blistering noise set, in keeping with New Zealand noise label Corpus Hermeticum’s aesthetic. The listener should not expect the sweet psychedelic pop of his Psychic Hearts album of the same year; rather, Moore explores his interest in freeform improvisation on this live set recorded in 1994. The recording is lo-fi, but that adds to it’s candid charm, as his guitar thrashing reaches peaks of noise only hinted at in early Sonic Youth. The duo works along lines that are more akin to the Blue Humans — with whom drummer Surgal began — and also seems influenced by such underground acts as Fushitsusha and the Dead C. Moore’s guitar is so distinct, however, that many parts here could be mistaken for a live Sonic Youth recording from that band’s more heady and chaotic ’80s period”
Until recently. Of late Thurston Moore, co-founder of Sonic Youth, terroriser of Jazzmasters, walking building block of modern indie-rock, has been spending a lot of time between four walls, with a guitar in his lap and one eye on the spread of COVID-19 in his adopted hometown of London.
“I’ve loved working on guitar in the privacy of my flat, knowing that I had all these days ahead of me to do that,” he says. “But psychologically it’s a conflict. I’m in a place where I can be creative without the anxiety of having to go out and work, yet the only real revenue I have is from going out and working. I enjoy being in one place, but there’s friction because it comes with this situation where people are susceptible to getting fatally ill on such a scale that it’s almost too strange to believe.
Moore’s new solo record, “By The Fire”, is intended as a balm of sorts. Let’s not pretend that it’s prophetic or the perfect record for these imperfect times, but close to its heart it has a relevant maxim cribbed from avant-jazz musician Albert Ayler: “Music is the healing force of the universe.” Recorded pre-lockdown, with a few overdubs captured once the world had shifted, Moore can see the uncertainty and anger of the time in the manner he tailored the finished album as much as any individual song.
“The situation with the pandemic, and seeing the uprising of people’s rage in the USA because of the nefarious leadership there, informed a lot of how the record was sequenced,” he says. “The title certainly references that. I wanted it to be about people communicating in a really primal way – sitting around the fire, telling stories, but also about what fire denotes when people take to the streets. They light fires to get attention for the oppression that’s happening. Records are always made in the moment, even if the songs are part of your historical language. They’re always about what’s happening now.”
Thurston Moore’s solo material gives a better view of his conflicting tendencies, with seventh proper solo album “By the Fire” embracing both noisy, chaotic tangents and the blurry impressionistic poetry that has long been the core of his songs. The record begins with the kind of layered, intricate guitar figures and steady rock rhythms that have been Moore’s calling card since the early ’90s.
By The Fire is a literate reading of Moore’s ambitions and crutches. Backed by My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Googe on bass, guitarist James Sedwards, Jon Leidecker on electronics, lyricist Radieux Radio and Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley in a drumming job-share with Jem Doulton, he weaves meditative, occasionally meandering, guitar instrumentals together with immediate, hooky indie-rock songs like “Hashish”, which sounds like a grizzled sibling of Sonic Youth’s Sunday.
“The album starts out very joyful, with proper, straight up pop-rock songs,” Moore says. “I wanted the trajectory to at least go through this period where it gets a bit more complicated. The final piece, Venus, is about sounds coming together through a structure. The guitars go through a very specific sequence of notes, and the only improvisational part is my cueing.
“It’s by feel – the high sixth string, starting on the second fret and moving all the way up to the top of the neck. Then repeat that sequence on the next lowest string. I wanted to have this piece that was all about these continuing ascensions and returns, which encapsulated what was happening musically with all these different ideas. It’s sort of like: ‘Here’s the catalogue of notes used on this record’.”
The ham-fisted grunge rock of “Cantaloupe” and fuzzy, churning push of “Breath” are also well-covered ground, sounding like they could fit in nicely in different parts of Moore’s back catalogue. Instead of presenting “Breath” as a compact rock song, however, he stretches it out into a sprawling, multi-part epic. The track turns dynamically as it moves from a lengthy gentle intro through to passionate verses, explosive instrumental sections, and breakdowns into formless squalls of feedback. This kind of dense song construction becomes the factor that sets By the Fire apart from the rest of Moore’s solo efforts. “Siren” follows the same approach, building over the course of a 12-minute run time from long, lazy stretches of chiming guitars to rolling waves of rhythmless sound. The vocals begin at just about nine minutes into the song after the completion of a full cycle of tension and release. Songs like “Locomotives” and “Venus” are similarly built, each burning on for well over ten minutes as they rise and fall through various movements. These intense full-band extrapolations are broken up by more subdued moments like “Dreamers Work,” which find Moore alone with a guitar, rambling through cloudy autumnal reflections.
Moore has been undertaking expeditions like this for 40 years. Born in Coral Gables, Florida in 1958 and largely raised in Bethel, Connecticut, he moved to New York City in the late 70s with a white Stratocaster, passed down from his older brother along with a few Hendrix moves, in hand and “Louie Louie” still ringing in his ears. And not a moment too soon, because in Thurston Moore’s world, punk rock smashed the reset button on everything.
Its arrival immediately drew a line in the sand between before and after that first power chord cleaved its way through his brain. He saw his own tall, unwieldy frame reflected back at him in the form of Joey Ramone, felt the future in the electro mayhem of Suicide. His Zappa and Zeppelin records would moulder in his mother’s basement as he sought out things that were new, newer, newest. In the city he found that on tap, roving out from his apartment amid the gonzo weirdness of the Lower East Side as punk begat new wave, no wave spat back and hardcore wind-milled into the conversation.
“The documents were just so incredible,” Moore remembers. “And you could actually buy a seven-inch and a fanzine and not suffer too much from it. Going to a guitar store was all about gawking, maybe playing it and then walking out without anything to show for it. Unless you had deep pockets, it was an excursion in window shopping. To me, the records were what I was getting my guitar education from anyway. You’d hear the first Scritti Politti seven-inch and it was just so odd, or the Slits album and how it was produced by Dennis Bovell. One after the other, from ’77 through to like ’81, it was relentless.”
Into this maelstrom came the avant-garde guitar orchestras moulded and manipulated by composers Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. Moore ate up the punishing, confrontational volume of the music, studied their grand plans to build sounds that no one had heard before, and channelled these ideas of perpetual motion and experimentation into his contributions to a new band called Sonic Youth.
“I remember when the Clash first played New York after the second album,” he says. “They didn’t play CBGB or Max’s Kansas City, they played at this big place, the Palladium. Everybody in our world went to that gig. They came out and just tore the roof off the place. The next six months, they came back again. And you know what? It wasn’t the same, because so much had happened since – new ideas and records and bands. There was such an amazing amount of radical things happening that the Clash at the Palladium part two sounded a little too traditional. I was like, ‘I’m gonna go see A Certain Ratio because that’s more interesting right now.’ It was an amazing time. Our band started in the thick of that.”
On By The Fire, the instincts he honed in that anything goes world are still relevant. What has changed is the dynamic between Moore and his bandmates. He is a bandleader here in a manner that he never was during Sonic Youth’s tenure, when his interjections were only one part of the puzzle alongside those emanating from the powerful creative minds of bassist Kim Gordon and guitarist Lee Ranaldo.
Their bold brand of art-school anthemics, roiling dissonance and searing cool – which spanned 15 albums, at least five of which qualify as sacred indie-rock texts – was always a collage. Since Sonic Youth’s passing in 2011, with the acrimonious end of Moore and Gordon’s marriage at its heart, he has sought to foster collaborations that feel different.
“From the outset, Sonic Youth was a democratic concern,” he says. “As most young bands are, and should be, it was people coming together to create the sum of their parts. Sometimes it’s really magical – from the Beatles to the Pistols. Some people have stronger egos than others but it’s always about the band. The band is writing the songs as opposed to one chief songwriter. That’s what Sonic Youth always was. All the publishing, all the song writing is, ‘All songs by Sonic Youth’. It doesn’t matter who wrote the lyrics, who brought the idea in. It’s in the forum of Sonic Youth. I didn’t feel like I needed to experience that again.”
His approach isn’t pernickety, though. It’s still about the songs. “I certainly don’t dictate to Deb Googe what to play on bass,” he adds. “She’s a formidable player, and I want her to play with me because of how she writes her own lines. At first, James was playing in unison with me, but I realised I was underselling him. I can’t play lead guitar in his manner – it’s really high technique, traditional playing. He plays like that effortlessly. But for him, it’s a challenge to work in alternate tunings, and he’s risen to the occasion.
“We’ve grown into hearing each other. I think he feels a little bit more comfortable with moving away from just trying to acknowledge what I’m doing, and that comes with time, spending years together on the road. You can hear that camaraderie in these pieces. It’s quite different to the relationship I had with Lee [Ranaldo] as a guitar player. That can’t be replicated, not that I’d want to. It was too personal. Lee and I spent 30 years growing up together.”
While Moore describes Sedwards’ key influences as “equal value Led Zeppelin and the Fall”, he’s also a Sonic Youth head. And that means that he knew alternate tunings were part of the gig from minute one – the sight of Moore’s hand on a tuning peg has come to mean the same thing as another guitarist working their way into the meat of a solo. As with so many elements of that New York punk scene Sonic Youth’s fascination with tunings – and taking power drills to pickups – sprang from a place that balanced creative abandon with hard facts: their gear was pawn shop junk.
“When I first saw Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca play, I didn’t know they were playing alternate tunings,” Moore admits. “It wasn’t really until I started playing with them that I was like, ‘Okay, this guitar is all high E strings, and this one is all G strings. I see, you’re making one massive guitar.’ That was very informative and really exciting. When Sonic Youth started the first guitars we had were so cheap and horrible that they sounded terrible in traditional tunings.
“But they sounded great when you put a drumstick underneath the 12th fret to create this noded guitar where you could play either end of it. For the economics of it all, I can’t now have a dozen tunings on a record and go out and have a dozen guitars on the road. In the 90s, when we had such a high profile, Sonic Youth toured in a way that allowed us to travel with two dozen guitars, so we could write in any tuning and your tech would pass you a guitar. I don’t have that kind of comfort zone or privilege anymore.”
Sonic Youth’s guitar slingers played a huge part in making the Jazzmaster the symbol of alternative guitar cool that it remains today, and Moore and Ranaldo’s dealings with Jazzmasters began in earnest back in the mid-80s. Their sideline in modding them – ripping out electronics, sacrificing switches, and in Ranaldo’s case adding Tele Deluxe pickups to his ‘Jazzblaster’ – began immediately afterwards. Sonic Youth’s guitars quickly became good for nothing except playing Sonic Youth songs. It is one of the most symbiotic relationships between musicians and instruments in rock history.
“The charity shop guitars were just falling apart,” Moore remembers. “Their shelf-life was limited, especially with the way we were treating them. As soon as we had a little coin, I remember going up to 48th Street in Manhattan, where Manny’s Music was and all these iconic stores. We were stepping it up a bit, but not too much. Lee pointed at a Jazzmaster and went, ‘That’s the kind of guitar [Television’s] Tom Verlaine uses.’ That was a selling point right there.
“Nobody was playing Jazzmasters on the scene at that time. We got a couple for next to nothing. They were considered to be a country and western guitar, or some old fogey 50s jazz guitar. We began to modify them when we realised we were hitting these unnecessary switches. We were like, ‘Man, all we need is a toggle switch between the two pickups and a volume knob. We’ll keep the tone knob on its brightest end.’ That’s it. We started digging out all the electronics and soldering them back together again.”
In Sonic Youth’s wake, with waves also made by guitarists including J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, the Jazzmaster became an indie-rock fixture.
“It was basically a matter of economics that we chose that guitar,” Moore admits. “But the aspects of it were so intrinsic to what we were interested in. We were already noding guitars, and the fact that the Jazzmaster had all this real estate behind the bridge to work with was really good. That’s a whole other instrument right there – a real high register electric guitar string sound. I have a long reach so the Jazzmaster fits my body like no other guitar. There’s nothing else I feel as comfortable with.”
It should come as no surprise, then, that Moore and Sedwards both leaned heavily on Jazzmasters during work on By The Fire. Moore’s pre-CBS Sunburst was acquired in Sonic Youth’s final throes as a backup before stepping up when the band’s gear was stolen. “It has become what the previous Jazzmaster was,” Moore says. “In the words of Sunburned Hand of the Man founder John Moloney, ‘Excalibur!’”
Sedwards, meanwhile, plays a guitar that is essentially as old as Jazzmasters come. The gold ‘59 model also tumbled into Moore’s possession after Sonic Youth were robbed in a semi-legendary incident in Orange County, California in 1999 (several guitars from the heist have been recovered since, largely thanks to diligent fans). “It was a gift from Patti Smith in sympathy, because they had gotten ripped off as well at some point,” Moore says. “It happens to the best of us. That guitar is really cherished.
“If a Sonic Youth guitar goes on the market, completely gutted and rewired, they become these very personalised, iconic items,” he adds. “It’s a Sonic Youth guitar. Whoever ripped them off, they could take them to a guitar store and they’d probably look at them and go, ‘These guitars aren’t worth anything!’ I hope they’re starting some noise-rock groups.”
Another curio is Moore’s Sunburst Fender Electric XII. It has ties to a piece commissioned by the Barbican in London, which provides added context for By The Fire’s extended workouts while linking back to his earliest days in experimental music. Next to the sunnier side of his new record, this nebulous composition (which was released as part of Moore’s Spirit Counsel box set in 2019) recalls Branca and Chatham as much as it speaks of his place as an indie-rock sage who will always be down to get improvisational.
It underlines the fact that Moore’s guitars are often part of the music: from tunings through to the feedback screaming out of his amp. Living in London, he has collaborated with a host of experienced, daring free improv musicians, sometimes adapting his style to offer a febrile, unpredictable noise counterpoint. The experience has become part of his make up as a player.
“Knowing that you can present feedback as a spontaneous musical gesture is something that started to become a big part of Sonic Youth’s songwriting at some point,” he says. “That to me is as good as any chord run, or any blues scale. It can have a life of its own, and you’re a bit of a lion-tamer. I can actually manipulate and bend the neck and create things that way. You can engage the guitar physically with the amplifier, creating some slight bends without destroying everything.
“I don’t really know if I ever see the guitar completely as a tool. When I go to a radio station and they want me to play a song, it’s almost impossible. The song that I have is about which guitar is being played. Even if they have some hired Jazzmaster sitting on a guitar stand, the song is going to suffer because of that. It won’t sound right. I have a very personal relationship with the guitars that I play. I never see them as interchangeable.”
The album is one of the more intentional chapters of Moore’s solo work, melding his long-studied Branca-esque walls of guitar and mystical lyrical viewpoints with a new, patient approach to composition. By the Fire isn’t a drastic shift, but as Moore goes deeper into the sounds he’s been exploring for decades, he uncovers new magic.
Thurston Moore’s “By The Fire” is out on September 25 through the Daydream Library.
Thurston Moore (ex-Sonic Youth) is releasing a new album, “By the Fire”, on September 25th via Daydream Library. This week he shared a new song from it, the 12-minute long “Siren.” At first you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking it’s an instrumental track, but then Moore’s vocals come in later in the song.
By the Fire also features Deb Googe (My Bloody Valentine) on bass and backing vocals, Jon Leidecker (aka ‘Wobbly’ of Negativland) on electronics, James Sedwards on guitar, and Jem Doulton amd Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley alternating on drums. It is Moore’s seventh solo album and recorded in North London earlier this year, just before the COVID-19 quarantine.
Moore and Daydream Library have released this statement about the album: “By the Fire is music in flames. 2020 is our time for radical change and collective awareness and Thurston Moore has written nine songs of enlightenment, released to a world on fire. Taking a cue from Albert Ayler’s ‘music is the healing force of the universe,’ this recording offers songs as flames of rainbow energy, where the power of love becomes our call. These are love songs in a time where creativity is our dignity, our demonstration against the forces of oppression. By the Fire is a gathering, a party of peace—songs in the heat of the moment.”
Thurston Moore started Sonic Youth in 1980. Since then Thurston Moore has been at the forefront of the alternative rock scene since that particular sobriquet was first used to signify any music that challenged and defied the mainstream standard. With Sonic Youth, Moore turned on an entire generation to the value of experimentation in rock n roll.
This is a Fourth of July Love Transmission (with an upside down US flag = distress, but Change is coming). Thurston Moore (vox, guitar) / Deb Googe (bass) / James Sedwards (psychedelic molten lead guitar solo) / Jem Doulton (percussion). After announcing a new solo album called By The Fire a couple of weeks ago, Thurston Moore shared another track off the project on ay. “‘Cantaloupe’ is a song about the dance of romance and surrealism, where the hallucinations of wild dreams come true,” the Sonic Youth founder wrote in the Bandcamp description.
By the Fire is Moore’s latest project with the Thurston Moore Group, which features former Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, My Bloody Valentine bassist Deb Googe, and guitarist James Sedwards. The album is slated for a September. 25th release on Moore’s Daydream Library Series label.
Moore paired the album announcement with a song called “Hashish.” He also recently released a nine-minute-long instrumental track called “Strawberry Moon,” and the politically charged “May Daze.” Sonic Youth also uploaded another rarity to their ever-growing Bandcamp archive on Friday, sharing Live In Bremen 1991.
Recorded in London by Syd Kemp and Kristian Craig Robinson at Total Refreshment Centre and mastered by Lasse Marhaug. Produced by the Daydream Library Series, a division of Ecstatic Peace Library, MMXX Special thanks to our stars: Christina Perzl, Bianca Kohl (skaters) and Ivan (cat) All rights reserved. All are born free and equal in rights. ”
Thurston Moore – guitar and vocals James Sedwards – lead guitar Deb Googe – bass Jam Doulton – drums
“By The Fire” – the new full length album from Thurston Moore is due out September 25th, 2020
Sonic Youth’s summer instrumental EP, Perspectives Musicales is, at first glance, a full-blown tribute to the 20th century French avant guard. From the EP’s title, to the exquisitely, tottering pretentious song titles — “Anagrama,”“Improvisation Ajoutee,” “Tremens,” and ” Mieux: De Corrosion.” The connections don’t stop there, the vinyl is Coke can red, adding a whiff of both socialism and aesthetics (the best and most effective red-vinyl release I’ve seen since J. Geils’ 70’s album, Bloodshot.
But the connections do stop with the music. While the French avant-guard, from Celine to Sartre to Foucoult, focus on the Absurd and are always tinged with a hint of nihilism, all four of the tracks on Perspectives Musicales are melodious, if not always harmonious, celebrations, and instead of a reign of disorder, Sonic Youth creates beautiful, often exquisite order out of what seems like thin-air.
This first release since 1995’s not entirely satisfying Washing Machine is a wonderful example of what Sonic Youth does best. While cutting apart and putting back together beautiful, even poppy melodies, Moore, Gordon, Shelley and Ranaldo never sound as if they’re lost in some sort of psychedelic jam; in every step along the journey, there’s tremendous lyricism and harmony…which seem contradictory for a band whose trademarks include the meticulous musical dissection of harmonies. At their best, like on Washing Machine’s “Diamond Sea,” the results are glorious. And Perspectives Musicales, an all-instrumental effort in which all energy is focused on music and none of lyrics, is glorious. Perhaps only Genet could have appreciated music this celebratory.
The EP’s opener, the nine-minute plus “Anagrama,” sets the tone for what’s to come. Moore and Ranaldo weave around each other gently, slowing building to a peak; sometimes aggressively, sometimes downright prettily, they build droning melodies up to huge peaks and come back down again. Gordon and Shelley are working both as a rhythm section and also operate on their own level; on every song, Gordon’s bass-lines and Shelley’s drumming do as much to establish the melodic and harmonic structure of the song, and behind Renaldo and Moore, no strangers to melody themselves, that’s no small feat.
Perspectives Musicales is the first in a series of EPs Manhattan’s coolest hipsters are planning to release, according to Ranaldo. If they’re all as good as this, it’ll be a nice year indeed for Sonic Youth fans.
Thurston Moore continues to put out previously-unreleased songs from his vault during quarantine.These previously unreleased songs appear on his Bandcamp page, and he also recently put out a new instrumental and now he announced a proper new album, “By the Fire” its first single, “Hashish” .He made the album with his former Sonic Youth bandmate Steve Shelley on drums, My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Googe on bass and backing vocals, and James Sedwards on guitar (all of whom are also in the Thurston Moore Group), and it also features contributions from Wobbly (aka Jon Leidecker of Negativland) on electronics and Jem Doulton on drums. Thurston calls “Hasish” an ode to the narcotic of love in our shared responsibility to each other during isolation,” and it’s a relaxed yet hypnotic song that sounds like classic Thurston Moore, and is a very promising first taste of this LP.
Thurston also said: “By The Fire” is music in flames. 2020 is our time for radical change and collective awareness and Thurston Moore has written nine songs of enlightenment, released to a world on fire. Taking a cue from Albert Ayler’s “music is the healing force of the universe”, this recording offers songs as flames of rainbow energy, where the power of love becomes our call.
These are love songs in a time where creativity is our dignity, our demonstration against the forces of oppression. By The Fire is a gathering, a party of peace — songs in the heat of the moment.
Strawberry Moon (for three guitars)
Recorded At Daydream Library 3rd June 2020 London
a celebration of the strawberry ( full ) moon vibrations – free energy for change.
released June 3rd, 2020
This next one’s a lovely acoustic instrumental called “The Lords and the Ladies” that Thurston debuted on his 2013 UK tour with legendary folk singer Michael Chapman and recorded in London in 2015.
A midweek offering to greet the summer – this song was written a year or so prior to its recording and was played on the acoustic duo tour I shared with maestro Michael Chapman throughout England. released May 20th, 2020
written and performed by Thurston Moore for eva.
A soundtrack for our usa sisters + brothers to register as voters today, if you still need to – we can change the world – free all political prisoners – insurrection for common decency – rock n roll consciousness – more to come. “By the Fire” comes out September 25th.Thurston’s Daydream Library Series label
released May 1st, 2020 thurston moore group
bass – Deb Googe
drums – Steve Shelley
guitar – James Sedwards
guitar + vocal – Thurston Moore
recorded by paul epworth at the church London
foto / true love – radieaux radio – in the wilds of oz
Thurston Moore born 25th July 1958 Coral Gables Florida , teenage years spent in Bethel Connecticut then moved to NYC 1977, joins The Coachmen plays CBGB’s, Max’s and downtown art-rock dwellings, Joins Sonic Youth 1980-2014, then Chelsea Light Moving, immigrates to great smoke London, foreva love, solo group action, further free scenes, ecstatic peace library, daydream library, animal liberation
Sonic Youth have also been in the process of putting archival material on Bandcamp (their latest, Perspectives Musicales – Live At Cat’s Cradle 2000, came out on Friday timed with Bandcamp’s as has Lee Ranaldo.
Sonic Youth are continuing to upload items to their Bandcamp archive and today it’s the live record “Hold That Tiger” which was recorded in 1987 and released in 1991. Here’s the backstory from drummer Steve Shelley:
Originally released as a semi-official bootleg LP in 1991 by friend and music writer, Byron Coley, on his Goofin’ imprint (we would eventually hijack the Goofin’ moniker for our own band-run label a few years later). The recording was nearly 60-minutes in length, so to prevent manufacturing a cost-prohibitive double lp, the master was slightly sped-up to fit the entire concert (us blasting through a finely-tuned set of songs from Sister, EVOL and a nightly encore tribute to the Ramones), on one single lp. Cramming the grooves of the vinyl in such a way resulted in “Hold That Tiger” playing at a lower volume on the stereo, thus the “one hour long – don’t have a cow! – crank it up’ sticker affixed to the front of the original lp cover. A few years later in 1998, “Hold That Tiger” was remastered for CD re-issue. The audio quality was improved from the lower fidelity lp but unfortunately the slightly sped-up performance was not corrected – until today. We are pleased to make available the best-sounding version of Hold That Tiger – SY performing full-on in 1987 – via Sonic Youth Archive on bandcamp.
“Hold That Tiger” — now at its proper speed and volume — below.
Sonic Youth Archive is a home to live SY recordings and unreleased, self-released or stray SY recordings.
In other news: Kim Gordon is appearing on the debut album by LXB (the duo of The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst and Siouxsie/Creatures drummer Budgie); Thurston Moore has been expanding his Bandcamp archives, too, as has Lee Ranaldo.
Thurston Moore has released a new song titled ‘May Daze’, recorded with his Thurston Moore Group bandmates Steve Shelly, Deb Googe and James Sedwards. The new track was recorded at the Church in London with producer Paul Epworth, who also produced the group’s 2017 album ‘Rock n Roll Consciousness’.
‘May Daze’ is one of several rarities Moore has uploaded to Bandcamp over the past couple of months. Prior to its release, the former Sonic Youth guitarist had shared a trio of archival tracks from his now-defunct Chelsea Light Moving project, along with a Thurston Moore Group outtake from 2016 titled ‘Instant Transcendent Conjecture’.
Released May 1st, 2020 thurston moore group
bass – deb googe
drums – steve shelley
guitar – james sedwards
guitar + vocal – thurston moore
recorded by paul epworth at the church London
Thurston Moore has shared a cover of a New Order song, which serves as the B-side for his forthcoming trio of singles.
The Sonic Youth co-founder, who released his new album ‘Spirit Counsel’ last September , is set to drop a trio of 7-inch singles that all feature the special New Order cover, ‘Leave Me Alone’, taken from the Manchester band’s 1983 album ‘Power, Corruption & Lies’. Recorded in Salford, which Moore says “is the only place I would dare cover a New Order song, with local musicians and local pints”. “It was just one of those rare occasions, where something I wouldn’t normally do was done just for fun, and in homage and respect to the place.”
The DAYDREAM LIBRARY SERIES are ecstatic to announce the release of Thurston’s forthcoming trio of 7-inch singles:
1.) SPRING SWELLS 2.) THREE GRACES 3.) POLLINATION.
Each 7-inch comprises an excerpted moment from the Thurston Moore Group live in 2019, free-mixed and free-created by Wobbly (aka Jon Leidecker). The B-side of each is a special cover of a New Order track (recorded in Salford).
Moore releases the three singles on November 8th through his own Daydream Library Series.
Sonic Youth taught us, that a guitar isn’t just six strings and a fret board; it can be a wailing banshee or a starling singing its morning song. They taught us that age is no barrier to breaking into music.
There are moments in Sonic Youth’s catalog where fundamental song structures are nowhere to be found, no matter how hard you look. But there are also moments of pure beauty to be uncovered in the wall of noise made by the band and its front-line guitar attack,
A testament to the Sonic Youth legacy is the bewildering number of styles and movements that they’ve been associated with over their 30 year history. In a career spanning 30 odd albums and 60 singles they rejected the grand rock and roll heritage, instead pursuing experimentalism and developing the notion of ‘alternative’.
Their unconventional guitar tunings, feedback and experiments with noise borrowed from the free-form style of Velvet Underground and The Stooges and paired it with the New York no wave aesthetic. In doing so they pioneered a new soundscape that typified a generation who connected with their awkwardness and abrasiveness. From their first album in 1982 all the way up to 2012, when the band went on “indefinite hiatus”, Sonic Youth put the ‘noise’ into noise rock – shaping the world of indie and paving the way for bands like Nirvana.
I first heard Sonic Youth on MTV2. an hour-long documentary about some band I’d never heard of. Instantly I was hooked. I think it was the opening slur of Kool Thing, the chugging guitars and Kim Gordon’s vocal, brimming in nonchalance. I’d never heard a band that could make such a magnitude and symphony of noise, collecting every studio album, then the rarities and then the snobs-only bootlegs and noise albums. forking out hundreds of pounds on Sonic Youth.
Since that day the respect and adoration has never dwindled. Sonic Youth are one of the most important and influential guitar bands of all time, and one of the most prolific. Theirs is not just a world of albums; it’s collaborations, films, books, art and everything in between. Being a Sonic Youth fan, you get the full rock education.
Their early records were marked by excursions into noise, feedback and discordant layers of sound that they occasionally turned into mini symphonies. By the time they settled on their core quartet — guitarists and singers Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, bassist and singer Kim Gordon and drummer Steve Shelley they were finding exciting ways to organize that chaos. So here are our favourite Sonic Youth records .
Sonic Youth’s discography is rich with countless EPs, soundtracks, collaborations, solo projects, split singles, and the like. These run the gamut from indispensible companion pieces (the self-released ‘SYR’ series of mostly instrumental EPs, the Richard Hell-fronted side project Dim Stars), to frequently brilliant but frustratingly inconsistent vanity projects (noodle-prone film soundtrack Made In USA, pseudonymous side project Ciccone Youth), to diehard-baiting endurance tests (theArc–meets-Metal Machine Music amplifier worship of Silver Session For Jason Knuth). Of these, only the 1982 debut is included in the following review, for reasons of accuracy, and the fact that the band itself considers this their first official album. Many other necessary stopgaps, like the EPs Flower (1985) and Kill Yr Idols (1983), have been subsequently tacked onto CD reissues of Bad Moon Rising and Confusion Is Sex, respectively.
‘The Whitey Album’ (1989)
Credited to Ciccone Youth, and released less than half a year after Sonic Youth’s masterpiece ‘Daydream Nation,’‘The Whitey Album’ pays tribute to Madonna (Ciccone is her last name) with mostly new originals and a handful of covers. It’s supposed to be a joke they cover Madonna’s “Burnin’ Up” (with Mike Watt) and “Into the Groove,” as well as Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” but it’s pretty much self-congratulating and unlistenable. That happens when the songs you’re making fun of are better than your pointless side project.
‘NYC Ghosts & Flowers’ (2000)
Before heading into the studio to record ‘NYC Ghosts & Flowers,’ Sonic Youth had much of their gear stolen. So they put together the album using older instruments and equipment that they hadn’t touched in years. The result was a flat, underdeveloped album that probably would have ended up somewhere near this place even without the backstory issues. (The LP sounds like a mix of their 1983 debut and 1994’s deliberately difficult ‘Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.’) A reboot was in order, which came with 2002’s ‘Murray Street,’ their best album since their mid-’80s/early ’90s peak.
The least-loved Sonic Youth album by some margin, the underrated NYC Ghosts & Flowers is the sound of Sonic Youth starting from scratch, and not necessarily by choice. While on tour supporting 1998’s A Thousand Leaves, most of the band’s one-of-a-kind guitars were stolen, Fans who malign NYC Ghosts & Flowers may consider the album the point at which the band’s florid wordplay and Beat obsession would finally get the better of them, but more attentive fans will note that Sonic Youth has always used the influence of poetry as a catalytic element for their expansive jams, usually with transcendent results. If the specter of cafe existentialists looms too large over NYC Ghosts & Flowers, the album remains noble as an ‘all in’ gesture that casts a defiant shrug at potential alienation, and we might recall that the history of great rock and roll is pockmarked with similarly courageous endeavors. Twelve-string guitars are introduced, as is the presence of the inimitable Jim O’Rourke (who would officially join the band as a full-time member for the next two albums). The album also boasts a spellbinding title track by Lee and a classic in opener “Free City Rhymes.” NYC Ghosts & Flowers is a bewitching album that rewards repeat listens and deserves far better than its reputation.
‘The Eternal’ (2009)
Sonic Youth’s last album doubles as a neat summation of the band’s quarter-century career. It’s noisy, messy and arty; it’s also a straightforward rock ‘n’ roll album at times, brimming with definable hooks. In the end, it all still sounds like Sonic Youth, something they couldn’t shake over 15 albums. Not that they’d want to.
Diffusive and divisive, The Eternal has in common with Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star an affinity for direct, shorter songs, and as far as ‘final albums’ go, this one leaves us hanging a little. Picking up where the catchier and more immediately likeable Rather Ripped left off, The Eternal adds a new fifth member in Mark Ibold (late of Pavement) after a short-lived return to a four-piece for Rather Ripped. The meatier production of The Eternal well suits the sturdier, more melodic tunes, but it’s the endearingly seasick-sounding “Malibu Gas Station,” the romantic “Antenna,” and Lee’s uncharacteristically somber “What We Know” that really sparkle. And no Sonic Youth mix CD would be complete without the hopped-up “Leaky Lifeboat (For Gregory Corso),” featuring a rare Thurston and Kim unison vocal that conjures a bizarro world Dead Moon.
Sonic Youth (1982)
Originally released on Glenn Branca’s Neutral label and the only Sonic Youth album to feature original drummer Richard Edson, the band’s debut sounds like the dark, post-punk cousin of Thurston’s spunky new wave band The Coachmen. Punk mostly in the temporal sense, the songs force-feed jangle to dissonance, occasionally sounding like a more melodic (though not much more) Public Image Limited. Though almost unrecognizable from the Sonic Youth we know today, Sonic Youth nevertheless remains a decent if inauspicious debut that offers a fleeting glimpse of what was to come. It’s also fitting that the cassette version of the first album by a band that would become synonymous with experimentation features the entire program repeated on side 2 –- in reverse.
‘Rather Ripped’ (2006)
Jim O’Rourke, who helped round out ‘Murray Street’ and ‘Sonic Nurse,’ was gone, and the band was about finished with Geffen Records, too. Their last album for the major label that briefly carried them outside of cult status is also one of their most accessible. The melodies and production never sounded cleaner, and the grown-up themes covered here, like infidelity, hinted at the personal problems that would end the band five years later.
Both “Rather Ripped” and “The Eternal”, their last two records, command nothing less than an energetic free-for-all and very rarely feel the need to stop and come up for air.
Rather Ripped was Sonic Youth’s last contracted album for Geffen, and you could say they went out with a bang. From the punk-evoking stencil fonts on the cover to the relative brevity of the songs (seven out of 12 tunes clock in at under four minutes!), the message is clear: no fucking around. Steve’s drums are mixed good and loud, which ably serves this relatively cleaned-up and frequently poppy version of the band. The least noisy Sonic Youth album since the s/t EP, Rather Ripped nevertheless forsakes none of the band’s classic dynamism and charm — think of it as a well-earned vay-cay from the yawning void. “Incinerate” is the band’s best single in years, Lee’s “Rats” outrocks everything on classic rock radio, and the oddly bucolic “The Neutral” marries a Paisley Underground jangle to shimmery guitars reminiscent of the Cure circa Disintegration (this is likely accidental). Not a moment of Rather Ripped meanders and not a note is wasted. Missing the spectral abstraction fans have begun to expect from this era, this is definitely not the Sonic Youth album to patiently count ceiling tiles to, but as a showcase for the leaner, punchier side of the band, Rather Ripped more than holds its own.
‘A Thousand Leaves’ (1998)
Sonic Youth made some money as part of the 1995 Lollapalooza festival, so they invested it in their own studio, which led to 1998’s overindulgent ‘A Thousand Leaves’ Two songs push the nine-minute mark, and one clocks in at an exhausting 11 minutes. It’s their most mannered and most excessive album, but there are some good moments buried here.
The first thing you notice about the Sonic Youth of A Thousand Leaves is that there are fewer traces of punk than ever, at least in the aural sense. Following a long tour, the band established their own studio, Echo Canyon, to allow for more time to experiment with the backlog of songs written during the three-year break between albums — the longest such break in the band’s history. It is no wonder all of this wood-shedding yielded the first batch of the mostly crucial SYR series of non-album studio experiments. Though the band’s jammy tendencies came to the fore on previous album Washing Machine, there are no caffeinated respites like that album’s “No Queen Blues” to be found here. A Thousand Leaves, however, more than any other Sonic Youth album, provides a bridge that connects two of the band’s distinct phases, and, as such, is a great introductory album for newcomers. While “Wildflower Soul” hearkens back to the spindly jams of EVOL, and “Sunday” recalls the melancholic motorik of classics like “Dirty Boots,” songs like the epic “Hits Of Sunshine (For Allen Ginsberg)” foreshadow the Beat-obsessed ethereality of future albums NYC Ghosts & FlowersandMurray Street.
‘Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star’ (1994)
Thanks to the emerging alternative nation, Sonic Youth broke into modern-rock radio with 1990’s ‘Goo’ and 1992’s ‘Dirty.’ For their next album, they almost entirely abandoned the commercial pathways they had forged. They also left behind the sharper sense of songcraft and the relatively big hooks found on the preceding LPs. The result was a moody, dismal record that probably pleased old fans who thought they had sold out on ‘Goo’ and ‘Dirty,‘ but it’s a bummer all the way.
Based on the title alone, many fans might have incorrectly assumed, upon its release, that Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star was a collection of three EPs. In retrospect, that feeling of disengagement from the material as a body of work is understandable. Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star is the first album to not feature a Lee-sung number since Bad Moon Rising (also a lesser album in the discography –- coincidence?), and was to be followed by a long touring hiatus. Recorded by a likely baffled Butch Vig the album is full of short, jarring songs with atmosphere to spare. There are some brilliant moments –- the propulsive “Bull In The Heather” is a sort of cousin to the Breeders’ unlikely hit “Cannonball,” and the chugging “Screaming Skull” is manna for fans wishing every Sonic Youth song was a variation on “100%.” Another highlight is Thurston’s affecting “Winner’s Blues,” a rare ‘unplugged’ number that portends future solo album Demolished Thoughts. Bonus: to save money, Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star was recorded over the band’s previously used master tapes (a common practice), so if you turn the album up real loud, you can hear Sister leak through during quiet parts!
‘Confusion Is Sex’ (1983)
Messy, noisy and lo-fi to the point it renders the album almost unlistenable, Sonic Youth’s debut LP suffers because of its unfocused chaos. The band used this approach a few times throughout its career, but ‘Confusion Is Sex’ is coupled with the inescapable fact that Sonic Youth hadn’t yet learned how to make records.
Confusion Is Sex is a great record, but only a contrarian would name it a favorite. The frankly terrifying Sonic Youth of Confusion Is Sex is mostly absent from later albums (and the debut EP), but it’s a most welcome anomaly. Unlike Bad Moon Rising, the unselfconscious nihilism of Confusion Is Sex rings remarkably true. The leaden and uneasy opener “She’s In A Bad Mood” sets the tone, as each subsequent song one-ups the previous one with increasingly intensifying onslaughts of sinister solid-state rumble and somnambulent keening. Even the cover of the Stooges’ pogo-worthy “I Wanna Be Your Dog” sounds here like something Swans deemed too unsettling to release (Swans drummer Jim Sclavunos plays on all but two tracks). Other highlights like “Shaking Hell” and “Protect Me You” (which — trivia fans take note — is the only Sonic Youth song on which Lee has ever played bass!) feature guitars that sound like the vibrations of axe handles after striking a stone. Visceral and relentless, Confusion Is Sex is one the best no-wave albums of all time, and the fact that it doesn’t even crack the top 10 of this countdown says a lot more about this band than this album.
‘Bad Moon Rising’ (1985)
Between their first and second albums, Sonic Youth released a pair of EPs that nailed down the classic sound they were inching toward and which they finally achieved here. There were still a few ragged edges to shake off, but ‘Bad Moon Rising’ leads straight into the band’s most productive and fertile period. By their next album, Sonic Youth’s core lineup was complete.
The 1985 sophomore album, reissued and add four bonus tracks. Features Death Valley ’69 with Lydia Lunch. Sonic Youth’s second full-length LP Bad Moon Rising was originally released on Homestead and Blast First in 1985. The album is a fascinating examination of “the junction where hippie idealism [meets] the cold hard world,” says guitarist Lee Ranaldo, “where Woodstock [meets] Altamont Death Valley, Charles Manson, Brian Wilson, musicians, murderers, heroes and villains.” Its original eight-song tapestry of droning guitar feedback, distant clattering percussion, and sullen vocals, all held together with interstitial noise loops and shadowy haze, ambles through a long, dark night before the feverish Death Valley ’69, driven by runaway guitar riffs and a frantic Thurston Moore / Lydia Lunch vocal duet, pounds the capstone into place. Sonic Youth’s big leap forward from Confusion Is Sex and Kill Yr Idols “reflects the spirit of the time,” to quote All Music Guide. Bad Moon Rising views “American gothic through the glassy eyes of wilful moonlit paranoia.” Back in print on Goofin’ Records, this reissue includes bonus tracks Flower and Halloween, both from a 12″ single of the same era.
‘Murray Street’ (2002)
Sonic Youth had spent more than a half decade creatively lost when they released ‘Murray Street’ in 2002. The emergence and destruction of the alternative rock boom in the mid-’90s was both a blessing and a curse, as the band, after reaching relative commercial success, violently turned away with some of its most experimental noise. ‘Murray Street,’ which added multi-instrumentalist Jim O’Rourke to the lineup, marks a comeback powered by a compromise of everything they do so well namely beautiful noise occasionally shrouded in vaguely straightforward songs.
Murray Street is the first of two albums to feature newly minted fifth member Jim O’Rourke, and if his influence is harder to detect here than on, say, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, consider that a weird guy supplementing a weird band will naturally have fewer noticeably drastic results than a weird guy supplementing a not-as-weird band. Though Kim has never been a stranger to playing guitar on Sonic Youth records (in fact, she’d been favoring it for years), O’Rourke’s auxiliary support facilitated both the three-guitar era of Sonic Youth and the added excitement of Thurston and Kim as occasional frontman and frontwoman, respectively, during concerts. When diehards insist that the band’s late Geffen years are often overlooked, they mean this album. All over Murray Street, guitars corkscrew around each other like a 21st century Television bequeathed with a second Richard Lloyd, with every sound rendered in loping, immersive tangles. Call it a ‘return to form’ if you like — for once, the appellation fits. “Karen Revisited,” whose ambitious mixing of studio recordings with live jams does nothing to dispel notions of Sonic Youth as the new Grateful Dead, anchors the album with typical slow-burning guitar synergism. “Sympathy For The Strawberry” (featuring Lee on keys!) slowly cascades from delicate restraint to white-knuckled abandon. Best of all is the dreamy and profluent “Rain On Tin,” whose celestial jam sounds like it’s trying to provide the soundtrack to a visit to the best planetarium ever.
2002’s “Murray Street”, typifies everything great about Sonic Youth: it’s part gentle, part manic, part cool, part quirky, part rocking and even part referential.
‘Sonic Nurse’ (2004)
‘Murray Street,’ from 2002, was the comeback album Sonic Youth desperately needed in the new millennium. The follow-up, ‘Sonic Nurse’ didn’t alter much. But where they sounded like they had something to prove on ‘Murray Street’ the group settles here, mining familiar territory for much of the album’s 60-plus minutes. It’s not bad, but there’s nothing really special about it either.
Sonic Nurse sounds, in many ways, like a sequel to Washing Machine both albums are records of remarkable maturity and depth and both hit the song-to-jam ratio just right. The songs on Sonic Nurse are mostly appended and enlivened by noisy-not-noodly improvisations, with clean guitars snaking their way around winsome clusters of gauzy low-end fuzz and supple percussion. Sonic Nurse is also back-loaded, and while this does not diminish tracks like the effortlessly dazzling “Unmade Bed” or the frenetic William Gibson ode “Pattern Recognition,” from track 5 (“Stones”) on, Sonic Nurse is perfection.
‘Washing Machine’ (1995)
The album on which Sonic Youth became a jam band. Following the disastrous ‘Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star’ from the year before, ‘Washing Machine’ returned to more structured songs, but with one new quirk: a handful of super-long songs. The epic closing number, “The Diamond Sea,” runs nearly 20 minutes, and it’s the best thing on the album. The guitars once again take the spotlight on their last great album until the ’00s.
They’re a band that confidently conjures up moments of flurried aggression alongside a unique brand of improvised majesty–a trait that is best exemplified by the awe-inspiring closer “The Diamond Sea” from the album “Washing Machine”.
Full disclosure: Washing Machine is my favorite Sonic Youth album. Though it cannot be given the title of ‘best’ in any objective way, it’s the one I often reach for when I need a dose. This is Kim’s album, the one on which she shines brightest, and the one on which her boho beat persona is most convincing and inspired. The title track is a marvel, beginning with a Loaded-era Velvets choogle that eventually segues at about four minutes in to a magical, goosebump-worthy moment of guitar catharsis. Lee’s great “Skip Tracer” features lyrics that rival even Steely Dan’s observational cynicism, and “Little Trouble Girl,” abetted by a great vocal cameo by Kim Deal, is “Tunic” with a Shangri-Las makeover. This leaves the elegiac “The Diamond Sea,” which you could consider Sonic Youth’s “Dark Star” if the comparison wasn’t such a cliché at this point. An awe-inspiring masterpiece of improvisation, “The Diamond Sea” is a moiré of atonal scrambling and harmonic scree that feels far too short at 19 and a half minutes. Washing Machine provides a roomy antidote to the claustrophobia of Goo and Experimental Jet Set,Trash And No Star, and the most perfect balance yet of the band’s rockist and avant tendencies. Even the cover art rules: Meta and mysterious as ever, the band chose to spotlight the torsos of two teenage fans in Sonic Youth T-shirts, one of which is autographed — by members of the band Come.
‘EVOL’ (1986)
The first album to include the classic Sonic Youth lineup of Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley, and their first LP to move closer to more conventional songwriting. The changes did them good. Tempering the noise factor, but still striking an experimental note that keeps the songs from drifting into predictability, ‘EVOL’ completes the creative leap started on the previous year’s ‘Bad Moon Rising.’
EVOL is an album full of suspense. Taken together with its proper follow-up, Sister, EVOL provides the cornerstone upon which the ‘Sonic Youth sound’ is built, due in part to the debut of drummer Steve Shelley, who would remain with the band permanently. EVOL is ground zero for the combination of chiming guitars and atonal skronk, qualities mostly absent on the band’s first EP and only hinted at on previous albums. It is on EVOL that Sonic Youth first happens upon the muggy delirium with which they would make with their name, launching a half million imitators in its wake. The virile “Tom Violence” sounds less ‘written’ than ‘coaxed from a cauldron,’ the sort of song that fogs windows. The off-kilter “Starpower” is a droning love song sung in frosty monotone — Kim evoking Nico. “In The Kingdom #19” features Mike Watt on bass and marks the debut of a Lee vocal, and what a debut! The harrowing story of a highway wreck over a suitably edgy instrumental backing, the tune is punctuated by a classic (and audible) moment of studio hijinx, as Thurston surprises Lee, mid-take, by hurling a handful of live firecrackers into the vocal booth. They don’t make ’em like this anymore.
‘Dirty’ (1992)
The follow-up to ‘Goo’ pretty much repeats the big-ideas-and-even-bigger-songs approach of that 1990 breakthrough. Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ producer, Butch Vig, cleans up ‘Dirty,’ a reaction and tribute to the growing grunge scene. It’s about as close to a mainstream record that Sonic Youth ever made — “100%” made it all the way to No. 4 on the modern-rock chart — but they never lost their individualism along the way.
Fuzzed-up bass lines and irreverent words of Sonic Wisdom define the expensive-sounding “Dirty”, a record that finds itself living in great tonal opposition to later works like the spacey “A Thousand Leaves” and darling of controversy “NYC Ghosts & Flowers”. They’re a band that confidently conjures up moments of flurried aggression alongside a unique brand of improvised majesty
Released in 1992 — the year after the year punk broke, you’ll recall — Dirty finds Sonic Youth accepting the lifetime achievement award from their grunge progeny and raising the stakes. While fans tend to overrate Dirty (for a certain demographic, this is as much a coming-of-age album as Are You Experienced?), the album has held up remarkably well, especially the deeper cuts which are so often overlooked in favor of showstoppers like the sexy “100%,” the declarative “Youth Against Fascism” (featuring Ian MacKaye in an extremely rare cameo role) and the irresistible “Sugar Kane.” Butch Vig’s clean production places the guitars center stage, but the rhythm section compensates by just pounding.
Kim’s vocals often steal the show, out-punking even Johnny Rotten on the airhead-baiting “Swimsuit Issue” and the snarling “Orange Rolls, Angel’s Spit,” the personification of big-sister cool on seductive album closer “Creme Brulee.” Dirty’s goofy vamps are frequently playful and rarely expansive, but even the simpler-sounding tracks are wonderfully deceptive. If on first listen a handful of these songs sound like they wouldn’t sound out of place on an Alice Cooper record, listen closer and you’ll notice a structural bed of wild, howling feedback beneath some of the album’s catchiest tunes.
‘Goo’ (1990)
For their sixth album (seventh, if you count the Ciccone Youth side project released a year earlier), Sonic Youth signed with a major label and actually ended up with a modern rock Top 10 hit. But they weren’t tamed by their new bosses. Instead, their new home opened them up to more focused songs and bigger, grander guitar workouts. A milestone record of the era, and an indirect door opener for Nirvana and other like-minded indie bands of the early ’90s.
Goo (originally titled Blowjob!) gave Sonic Youth a surprise hit with “Kool Thing,” a frenzied earworm of a tune about LL Cool J (inexplicably featuring an awkward cameo by a coerced-sounding Chuck D of Public Enemy). The album is perhaps the least art-damaged entry in the Sonic Youth catalog, and features some of the band’s most enTagsduring material. “Dirty Boots” is easily one of the greatest songs of the alternative rock era, perhaps only overshadowed on Goo by Lee’s masterful “Mote,” whose conflagrated denouement recalls early classics like “Expressway To Yr Skull” and “Hey Joni,” and fittingly closes out the first side of the album. Elsewhere, “My Friend Goo” successfully borrows The Replacements’ bored-as-fuck background vocal style from “I Don’t Know,” while the ‘noise metal’ break at the end of “Mildred Pierce” provides a most unexpected and jarring coda. The Raymond Pettibon cover art is no coincidence — Goo is Sonic Youth nodding to their punk roots.
The playing is also tighter that ever, and Kim begins to emerge as a truly great rock and roll singer, paving the way for gender-defying grunters like Royal Trux’s Jennifer Herrema. And if “Tunic,” a glum threnody for Karen Carpenter, comes off more roast than tribute, well, were you really expecting “Candle In The Wind?”
‘Sister’ (1987)
A run-up to Sonic Youth’s masterpiece ‘Daydream Nation,” just a year away, ‘Sister’ tests the ground of the band’s new alternative-pop direction, with genuine hooks cut into the flurry of guitars and distorted noise. An influential record on the upcoming decade’s army of flannel-wearing indie kids — maybe more so than the more defining, and defined, ‘Daydream Nation.’
Let’s get something straight. There is no album in the entire corpus of indie rock — not Loveless, not Surfer Rosa, not Psychocandy — that reaches the heights of invention, joy, and magic of Sonic Youth’s sublime fifth album. If your night out has ever been made by a floppy-haired stoner disemboweling a guitar; if you’ve ever had an out-of-body experience while hearing a record of disembodied vocal catatonia and libidinous murmurs; if you’ve ever gotten a contact high from a deliciously ‘off’ noise-rock tumult — then you can thank this album. The haunted reveries of Sister remain with you for years, even if you only hear them once. This isn’t a rock album — it’s mortar fire. It is the point at which Sonic Youth discovered a new and truly radicalized “psychedelic” music that owed nothing to Pet Sounds or Sgt Pepper’s, but to an amalgamation of record store arcana, suburban Gnosticism, and teenage kicks. Their peers may have been rocking, droning, and caterwauling, but Sister is the sonic manifestation of refracted light.
‘Daydream Nation’ (1988)
The epic double-album that helped shape a generation of guitar-wielding indie rockers, ‘Daydream Nation’ is a milestone record of the decade and genre. The opening “Teen Age Riot” sounds like a prophecy of rock ‘n’ roll to come, but the rest of the album soars along just as assuredly. And unlike their earlier work, the LP is filled with actual songs that build to mountain-scaling levels. When Sonic Youth made their next album two years later, they were on a major label and all ready to lead a new alternative nation.
Writing about Daydream Nation is sorta like writing about pizza. Almost everyone is familiar with it, everyone — save for a few loonies — agrees that it’s great, and everyone has their fussy preferences about it. The band’s first double album is a conceptually loose celebration/expose of the American badlands, as keen an examination of the concrete wilderness as ever constructed by a buncha guitar players. The album moves brilliantly, each song twisting into miniature vortexes, spiraling to exhaustion. As indebted to Amon Duul as Arto Lindsay, the album’s beauty sounds effortless, as if the band’s myriad public obsessions all converged and produced the album by divination. There is a piercing melancholy to many of the songs, not least “Teenage Riot” (for my money, still the band’s best song), despite reportedly being little more than a loving ode to Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis.
The double album ends, fittingly, with a trilogy of songs, a lofty concept whose irony was probably not lost on a band that was covering Crime’s “Hot Wire My Heart” on their previous album. Yet this trilogy is one of the few in the annals of rock and roll worth its weight in Thai stick, bearing none of the grandiose prog-rock pomposity one expects from a “suite” of songs. If anything, this third act (especially “Eliminator, Jr”) is as unfriendly as the album gets, recalling, if only for a couple of minutes, the earlier, fangier Sonic Youth of Confusion Is Sex.
“Daydream Nation”, the album that is often cited as the band’s greatest effort, was the first of theirs I heard. From the stoic beginnings of fan favourite “Teenage Riot” to the caustic climax of epic three-parter “The Wonder”, the album struck me in a way I wasn’t expecting. I relished in the abrasive noise break that bridges “Silver Rocket”, and was taken aback even further at the introduction of the rather sullen if strangely poignant “Providence”.
But as great an album it is, Daydream Nation barely reports on the band’s vastly alterable creative output. The Official Sonic Youth Reverb Shop on October 30th, where the noise rock pioneers will sell more than 200 pieces of gear and memorabilia from across the history of the band. you can head over to Sonic Youth’s Reverb LP shop to find hundreds of Sonic Youth’s exclusive test pressings, reissues, and rare records—including versions of Daydream Nation, Murray Street, Goo, and Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star—as well as additional pressings from Sonic Youth Recordings and Goofin’ Records. Items for sale October 30th will include more than 200 pieces of gear, as well as nearly 200 screen-printed show posters, rare poster-sized photographs, memorabilia, and personal relics. Head over to Reverb LP now to find Sonic Youth’s 300 exclusive test-pressings and other records, and sign up to be notified as soon as The Official Sonic Youth Reverb Shop goes live. Also, fans can check out nugs.net now for access to previously unreleased live audio and videos from Sonic Youth’s archives.
Whatever happens next, that ideal will surely be Sonic Youth’s legacy: an EVOLution of creative desires fuelled by the never-ending need to kick some serious six-string ass along the way.
![Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star [VINYL]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51bf2fJzYDL._SX425_.jpg)
The Fat Angel Sings 