Sonic Youth emerged out of the NYC  'no-wave' scene of the early eighties, and Sonic Youth records are often a battle between no-wave tunelessness and conventional melody, and this is what makes these records so exciting; there are really so few bands which are as unpredictable as the Sonics. True, you can have a rough idea of what a record is going to sound like (it's going to have melody, it's going to have discordance), but they continually surprise everyone, not least the critics who always seem itching to sum them up and dismiss them, then end up having to eat their words when the next album comes out.

The Sonics are also usually given credit for influencing just about everyone who plays a distorted guitar loudly. Nirvana are probably their most obvious protégés; it's probably true that were it not for Thurston Moore, there would have been no 'Nevermind'. But unlike a lot of bands continually name-checked as influences, the Sonics are both still alive and actually deserve the praise. And they also appeared in an episode of 'The Simpsons'. How cool is that?
 

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1991: The Year Punk Broke (VHS) (1993, Geffen)
'People of the universe!' Thurston Moore declaims, 'Tonight... tonight is the night that the sky will open and spray forth the divine hand with pointed finger, and say "Everybody! You're not just a duck! You're human! You are human! Go forth... go forth and THRASH!'

1991 was the year when Sonic Youth, supported by Nirvana and others, embarked on a tour. This the the video of that tour, but it's more than just a load of bands filmed on stage. It's the backstage footage which is the bonus, and it really shows what crazy motherfuckers Sonic Youth (Thurston especially) are. It's also fucking hilarious.

Though there are several bands recorded (Dinosaur Jr., Babes in Toyland, Gumball and even the Ramones doing an incomprehensible version of 'Commando'), it's clear from the start the only two bands that matter are Sonic Youth a Nirvana. Dinosaur Jr. wreck two good songs with tedious guitar wankery, Babes in Toyland do their cool three-kim-gordons-at-once thang for one track, but thankfully the bulk of this video is devoted to the Youth and their comrades in trash.

Sonic Youth prove their current pose as intellectual post-rockers is really a construction of the music press. The songs Sonic Youth perform are attacked with manic zeal, Thurston, Kim and Lee throwing their instruments are. Most surprising is who whacked Lee Ranaldo is on stage; despite having a reputation for being the precise, more studied half of the Youth's guitar onslaught. Instead he's as equally reckless as T-stone, at one point getting through three guitars in one song, mostly through chucking them across the stage at random.

But as I've said, this isn't intended to be just some bands playing on a stage. The performances are cut through with backstage footage as well as shots from later on in the same song, or even a different song. This is very disorientating, but I suppose it does create some feeling of the chaotic live experience, and helps to disguise the fact that there's only one handheld camera recording everything, bar some b/w shots from Lee. Still at times the video does have the appearance of something done by college students trying to get extra marks.

Surprisingly enough, the backstage footage is at times more interesting than the stage footage. Thurston Moore just doesn't shut up, saying the first thing which comes into his head, walking around European cities looking for used record stores that don't exist and pretending he understands the local's language. Thurston is definitely the star of this video, although Dave Grohl and the rest of Nirvana do occasionally vie with him in the insane comic genius stakes.

Here's one interview, where a foreign (Norwegian?) journalist asks Thurston what his show is going to be like;

'This one's gonna be a new Sonic...'
'How do you mean, a new Sonic?'
'Well, I'm gonna come out and I'm gonna immediately puke on stage, then douse the puke with lighter-fluid and light it, then I'm gonna kick it into the audience. This entire field of a hundred thousand people are gonna go up in flames. Then I'm gonna get a shotgun and just do, do it baby, and I'm just gonna keep on and on, on to the extreme. I don't call myself the only living white hope of the great era of the colours in the sky... my eye is full of beeswax.'
'Uh, yeah, okay.'

If you can get hold of a copy of this video (it's been deleted in the UK), I suggest you do so. It shows Sonic Youth, and Nirvana, at their peak, during a time which was the 'new 1977' of punk music.

Dirty (1992, Geffen)
It's not unreasonable to say that buying records now, I'm trying to recreate the feeling a had when I first listened to 'Dirty'. I bought it on impluse in a sale, having seen Sonic Youth mentioned as in influence in review of a band I liked.

The feeling I had was that it was crap. Really. I listened to opening track '100%' I thought it was just too raw, too simple. I was looking for something complex and preferably sounding a bit like Radiohead. But eventually, I got it. I listened to the album repeatedly until, at about 2am, I it clicked, and I loved it, and Sonic Youth, for evermore. Aaah.

It's probably just because this was introduction to a whole new side of music that I love this more than any other Sonics record. In the catalogue of SY's achievements, it's not as revolutionary as 'EVOL' or 'Daydream Nation'. But I still think this album has a zing, if you will, that separates it from other 90s Sonic Youth records like 'Goo'.

Opener '100%' is simple, it's true. It begins with a blast of Thurston Moore tradmark noise, before two bass and guitar join together in a thudding riff made up of one-note chords and Thurston doing his NYC hardcore voice. It's an opener on par with 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' or 'Foxy Lady'. This album's particular bag is a refinement of the Youth's more extreme sound, as seen on bits of 'Daydream Nation'. But partly because the guitars are even more detuned than usual (F#-F#-F#-F#-E-B was the main tuning on this record), it sounds heavy as hell. Thurston and Lee shred their guitars to fuck all through the record, and Kim Gordon's mercilessly out-of-tune thrash metal vocals have an edge which makes sandpaper look, like, really smooth.

At the same time, though, there is a strong element of meldoy going on; 'Sugar Kane' is almost a pop song (er, well, almost), and though 'Purr' sounds a bit too conventional, it still rocks. Equally rockist is 'Youth Against Facism', where the Sonic put any nonsense debates about their (lack of) politics to rest with riffed sloganeering.

This is always the album I turn to when I've had enough of nice, polite songs. Though the Sonic have intermittenedly recaptured 'Dirty's thrash brilliance, as far as I'm concerned this stands alone as my favourite Sonic Youth record.
 

EVOL (1985, Blast First)
i get frustrated with the new experimental New Yawk beat poet shtick that sonic youth currently ply. they're respected, sure, but does that alone give Kim Gordon license to play the trumpet painfully badly in the name of art? Their neu produckt 'NYC...' is leftfield and pretty damn good, but it does show the chasm between what the Youth see as experimental now (noodling, scraping, the aforementioned trumpet) and what they saw as experimental at the time they released EVOL (buzzing guitarz, general sinister feelings).

i know this is a review, but ill state right now for the record that this is my favourite sonic youth album and very definitely in my top 5 of all time. It was the first album i bought in college and i remember looking at the liner notes being homesick and waiting for things to happen to me. Those notes, written by some girl, said it was an album to discover life to; which sounded pretty wanky. But i heard sounds on this album i wanted to hear before, hell wanted to Make before but i didn't know how to create them...and this album probably turned me into the music snob i currently am. On the bus every morning i developed quite the superiority complex listening to 'Expressway To Yr Skull' at tinnitus inducing volume while my college contemporaries had to do with Puff Daddy rapping like pish on the radio... One word to sum up this album; tribal. The Sonic Youth sound on this record like  a close knit underground terror organisation, so tight that its scary & disturbing. 'Tom Violence' the opener is a prime example. Gordon's sinister (that word again) bass and Shelley's battlefield drums combined to create the mindfucking tone which the schizo guitarz complimented perfectly. Songs like 'Shadow of a doubt' 'Secret Grrl' and 'Death to your friends' were truly creepy, with even 'Death...',an instrumental, sounding like the audio equivalent of being repeatedly sick on a rollercoaster. They are also capable of schweet pop melody, albeit fucked-up schweet pop melody. 'Starpower' and 'Bubblegumn' give the impression of a biker gang Weezer. Lee Ranaldo's nonsense poetry (sorry i'm gonna call a spade a spade here) on 'In the Kingdom 19' is driven by the syphilitic drums and shookup guitarz...but the gold star moment is the exquisite, the regal 'Expressway To Yr Skull' with a bigger and sweeter tune than anything Rick Astley was coming up with at the time, suddenly find itself strapped to the front of a bullet train. It is truly one of the most adrenilised songs of all time and SY's best.

Evol proves itself to be Sonic Youths most exciting diverse and wonderfully unstable (mentally) long player. I await the film version with much anticipations. The death and explosions will be done in the most tasteful way.

NYC Ghosts and Flowers (2000, Geffen)
I admit I had some reservations about this album, and not just the pre-order reservation at Amazon.com. Sonic Youth had just played a gig (which I didn't see) at the All Tomorrow's Parties indie festival, which even the sympathetic and not exactly narrow-minded crowd seemed to think was pretty shit. It apparently consisted of approximately forty minutes of arseing around and 'improvisation', i.e. forgetting how to play your songs. In recent gigs they've woken up again and started playing the, er, hits, but at the time that was beside the point, because I had a horrible, nagging suspicion in the back of my mind; what if the instrumental meandering wasn't improvised, what if they were playing note-perfect their new, unreleased album?

Opening track 'Free City Rhymes' doesn't exactly begin encouragingly, with about three guitars chiming away for at least a minute. But the melody comes in gently, and it meanders along somewhere between pleasant and faintly disconcerting, until it gradually gets louder and louder, before finally ending up like the soundtrack to the tense, quiet bit in a John Carpenter film, just before the guy in the mask jumps out and screams, well, as it turns out he screams 'Make Way for the Midnight Princess!' as the second track ('Renagade Princess') kicks in, spine-tingling grungey rhythmics like something from 'Goo' only more so, gradually building up in intensity until it implodes into spacey, somewhat extraneous noise.

'Nevermind (What Was it Anyway)' is like the calmer cousin of 'Dirty's 'Orange Rolls and Angel's Spit', in that it seems to have about ten great riffs in it. It changes down a few octaves halfway through as Kim Gordon growls 'Men go to Jupiter, get more stoopider, women go to Mars, become rock stars', also starting up the inevitable 'so is it about Kurt and Courtney?' bollocks that results whenever anyone write a song with 'Nevermind' in the title.

Along with the title track, 'Small Flowers Crack Concrete' seems to form the album's core, its soul if you will. The track does the trick of starting impossibly quietly, and building up to a sheet of white noise, by way of Lee Randaldo's Robert-Creeley-style poet's lyrics. It's simply brilliant; while past albums have belonged to Kim or Thurston, it makes it clear this is the album where the standout tracks are Lee's.

After 'Small Flowers...' any track is going to sound weak, so that might be why 'Side2Side' sounds over simple. Even Kim Gordon continuing her lyrical obsession with underwear can't save it entirely; but after two of it's three minutes or so, the musical repetition and layers of apparently random words build up until the track can hold its own, and actually sounds like it has a groove.

'StreamXSonik Subway' is basically barmy, and of course it's a Thurston Moore track. The riff is as simple as the they come, the words about how music is like an underground subway, a sort of members-only club. It turns into Slipknot-meets-Kraftwerk in the middle, as impossibly heavy guitars and electro bleeps smash in, before the original riff cuts back. And it also features the lyric 'got rousted by a low-beam cop // got a ticket-patch for illicit flop // then froze me with he jesus gun' which might possibly be some sort of veiled comment on the totalitarian NYC regime.

The title track, however, brings it all together. Musically, it uses the same blueprint as 'Small Flowers...', only its even more explosive. Lyrically, it brings together all the album's themes; it's as if they've gone back to New York, and not found it much like they left it, or like it was in the heyday of the eighties. There is regret here, and in fact the album this resembles most is 'Daydream Nation'. The Sonics used a lot of guitars from that era to record this album, and it's a continuation of their great 1988 opus. But there's less fantasy here, now. The lyrics have a genuine authenticy. Sonic Youth are older now, and they speak from experience; there are ghosts of the past here, but there are also small flowers of the future cracking through.
 

A Thousand Leaves (1998, Geffen)
You have the ask the question; how weird can Sonic Youth get? Well, the answer is 'pretty damn weird'. Or it might be better to say that Kim Gordon can get pretty damn weird, while the rest of the band seem to have a certain limit. Obviously this record is on Geffen, not SY Records, and so it's therefore officially listenable, or at least what Sonic Youth consider listenable. But as usual, the inevitable moment where you go, 'Now that's just too avant guarde, thankyouverymuch' is present. Generally this inevitable moment usually features some really bad singing courtesy of Kim Gordon, or maybe just a minute or so too much of instrumental noise. The main difference with this album, as compared with their past work, is that the inevitable moment tends to go on for about 25% of the record.

'Contre Le Sexism' is kinda excruciating for the first two or three minutes or so, before something resembling a tune appears. Once again Kim gives the impression of singing a completely different song to the one the rest of the band are playing; not so much off-key as key-less. 'Sunday' is pretty ace, though, a 'Dirty'-esque pseudo-pop song destroyed pleasantly. 'Female Mechanic Now on Duty' is pretty ace, too; a truly mental blues-gone-mad riff slowly getting absorbed in a pile of effects.

'Wild Flower Soul' returns to 'Washing Machine's quieter, vaguely pastoral moments, and is truly lovely. 'Hoarfrost' sets Lee Ranaldo's poetry to music in a way that is nearly as good as 'NYC Ghosts and Flowers'. But I'm going to stop now, because in some ways this is an album which relies on the element of surprise; it's relationship between noise and riffs is even more closely defined than usual, somewhat akin to 'Daydream Nation'. Although this was called the album where the Sonics integrated their more wacky side projects into the Geffen side of things, in reality it seems to me more like they've written songs, then wilfully deconstructed them on the spot. This uniquely Sonic-Youthy way of working achieves both wackiness (or 'avant guarde', if you prefer) and tunes, not necessarily at the same time, but certainly in the same song.

But it does give the album a slightly disjointed feel; there are no tracks which are purely noise or instrumental noodling, but equally there are no pure 'Goo'-style pop songs, either. To me this albums feels more like a progression from 'Washing Machine's themes and style; compared to some of their work, this album is pretty quiet, and tracks like 'Snare Girl' are just plain lovely, in a 'Theresa's Sound World'-type-way.

Actually, there is one thing which I think sets this album apart from the kind of random improvisation they practice on their own-label releases; it's kinda groovey. Bizarre as that may sound, the long instrumental mid-sections have a repetitive Velvet-Underground-style rhythm, courtesy of Kim and Steve's backing, which makes them listenable; and also, somehow Thurston and Lee's improv'd guitar parts seems to make more sense than on some of their other records. In fact, if anything it's like jazz. Only good. Noise jazz, maybe.

This albums goes some weird places, it's true. And it's true that the shortest track is just under four minutes long. But it's Sonic Youth, what do you expect? Maybe they could have docked a few minutes of the instrumental stuff, and it wouldn't have been any worser for it. But it's kind of mental, kind of tuneful. Very Sonic Youth.

#LINKS#
Sonic Youth Official
i stand corrected; this site is excellent. it has mp3s of all the rare or out of print b-sides and eps available for download; actually this is probably the best, content wise, artist website i've seen.
Geffen
the label's official site; click on bands then choose from the list. you'll find sonic youth just under s club 7... the world has gone mad...
Saucerlike.com
this is really the best sonic youth fan site
Evol.org
it looks like shit and hasn't been updated since the dark ages, but this is still the biggest SY site after Saucerlike (and it has the best address!)
USSA.net
this site seems to be a mixture of sonic youth and, er, star wars. whatever turns you on, I s'pose
Unofficial Sonic Youth Page
old as the hills and just as ugly, but still a lot of stuff here
Sonic Truth
a really interesting site, also stuff about cat power and sleater-kinney among others
The Perfect Noise
a self-effacing site which basically tells you to have your own opinions
The Strip
this site seems to crash my browser, but I know it has worked before...
Sascha's Sonic Youth Page
a good site, with a few extras
Kill Yr Idols
this site looks like shit, but it's got a really interesting equipment list. well, I found it interesting, anyway.
 
 

This site in the public domain; you may copy bits from it providing you kill yr idols, although don't kill sonic youth, they're cool!

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