At this point, saying that Sonic Youth are the most influential rock band of the ‘90s is pretty much like preaching to the converted. But equally true is the fact that there is now quite a bit of distance between its members and their recent projects (not to mention what they do as a band) and what made them valuable in the first place. It wasn’t that long ago that I witnessed an intense display of Thurston Moore and drummer Chris Corsano producing a pummeling set at Minneapolis’ Fine Line (Jim O’Rourke was ‘onstage’) that actually had far more to do with the Ray Russell-Alan Rushton duets on Secret Asylum (Intercord, 1973) than any Downtown ghosts or flowers would belie. This was white noise and circulatory expansion at its art-garage finest, but how did they get here from punkville? After all, Sonic Youth were always harbingers of other things and areas of interest beyond their microtonal string-buzzing and helices of vocal non-sequiturs – if not a direct conduit to Arthur Doyle and Embryo, at least one did (or does) get the feeling that they are a window to the other side.
About a dozen albums and numerous side projects ago, Sonic Youth stitched up a trilogy in what some might call their finest hour (or least the most cohesive set of LPs of their career) with 1990’s Goo, their first for a major label and yet in hindsight one of their most overlooked recordings. If one looks at the stylistic arc of Sonic Youth, there is a trend for sure – 1986’s Evol (SST) was their first with drummer Steve Shelley, and certainly his approach made the difference between the primal urgency stemming from Bob Bert’s upturned trashcans and the fleet-footed, Mo Tucker-on-speed-and-Rashied fires of subsequent recordings. Evol had inklings of true cohesiveness in songs like “Tom Violence” and vulnerability in its rawness (Kim Gordon’s “Shadow of a Doubt”), but the next year produced Sister (SST), a more opened-up series of aural vistas that Evol could only allude to – reaching a collective understanding of how to let these currents flow in the span of a three-to-five-minute piece. Looking back on tunes like “Star Power” (from Evol), it is interesting to hear how at odds they were with themselves, reigning in something that shouldn’t necessarily be confined. Sister, of course, delivered one of the most frightening ‘airplay-worthy’ tunes of the decade, the album-opening “Schizophrenia,” at the outset a loose and jangled pop song with sails of detuned guitars and a mast of cruelly-advancing hooks that might find their way into being the inverted twin of an Aussie ‘80s hit machine. The funny thing is that, despite a tripartite structure that might seem constraining, the group was propelling itself more deliberately and was itself propelled more naturally here – they had honed it. As Moore and no-second-banana Lee Ranaldo let loose with frantic guitar interplay all over “Catholic Block,” it is orchestrated and driven, directional rather than continental drift. When feedback-drenched plateaus begin to drag against the ears, they come on the heels of panicky rave-ups like “Pipeline Kill Time,” not as the beginning and the end. Following Sister was something altogether different. Daydream Nation (Blast First!, 1988) is of course the double-album opus, the middle son of three, their own “take that, Hüskers!” and a reconciliation of boxing-in to driving those vertices forward.
One of the interesting things about Daydream Nation is that, unlike Sister, which starts off inordinately strong and seems to lose steam by the end, it steadily picks up its mass throughout the course of two LPs, making its closing statements into something one can look back over the entire set and discern a sense of wholeness to the proceedings (even if a few early cuts are somewhat dunderheaded). Slint’s Spiderland (Touch & Go, 1991) and Sebadoh’s III (Homestead, 1991) fall in this editorial camp as well. Daydream, like Goo recorded with Nicholas Sansano, offers some of the most cleanly-recorded guitar skronk you’ll ever hear – there is something to separating the walls of feedback- and fuzz-drenched guitar that, rather than defeating the purpose, actually brings complementary paths together more fluently. One can hear where they come from and what they respond to. Being hit with a sound you can physically experience as mass is one thing (see 1983’s Confusion is Sex or even live versions of “Pacific Coast Highway”), but being able to know that mass is another. Of course, that seems irrelevant when the opener, “Teenage Riot,” could’ve been ghost-penned by Alex Chilton, but when it segues into channel-specific ducking and diving from guitars tuned to a sine wave generator, it’s obvious they are in full stride half a side in. There is an easy peace of cymbal wash and strumming-with-drang closing out the side, a cascade of Swans/Spacemen/Kevin Shields/Guru Guru/Future Days that, whether true or not, always seemed to me like the first inkling that the group were really into something far beyond covering “Hotwire My Heart,” a world of pre- and postdating sound that they were caught in the middle of and were ever so happy to lead the curious into. Though it might seem preposterous to equate the SY maelstrom with free jazz, listening to a tune like “Cross the Breeze” one does get the feeling that they have found a way to play cohesively faster than semi-conventional rhythm allows. Thurston and Lee in tandem are like Albert Ayler playing with Beaver Harris; there is no way other than free time that these flights could be equaled rhythmically. Nor are they afraid to improvise at length, as three-fourths of “Total Trash” attest to. Ranaldo’s beat-poet excursions have finally settled aurally; whereas reading-with-noise prevailed on earlier recordings (and continued on some of his own solo releases), “Eric’s Trip” and “Hey Joni” present music that can match his frantically pleading delirium. The “Trilogy” (particularly its first two parts) that closes the record, “The Wonder” and “Hyperstation,” is, for lack of a better word, a motherfucker – the former spending its few minutes as an attempt to get away from itself tempically before it falls into the latter, a tense interplay of flying shards in an aural holding pattern while Thurston waxes poetic: “I put on a Sun Ra tee and I’m out with the door.”
But Daydream is the litmus against which all other indie-rock records are measured – “Polvo’s Daydream,” “Bright Eyes’ Daydream” (ugh…) – far be it that there was a slew of Sonic Youth records following it, most of them actually pretty good, and its direct follow-up a pure refinement of the fractured and fueled Stooges-by-Düsseldorf insanity that closed out side four. 1992’s Dirty is viably considered their pop-cultural breakthrough even as it purveys racket, while Goo at the time critically inching towards ‘sellout’ bait (notwithstanding the original Blowjob? title), became somewhat forgotten as it slipped into the chronological nether regions between underground classic and MTV’s Buzz Bin. Of course, “Kool Thing” was on MTV, usually late at night, as it featured guest vocals from Chuck D (not to mention Gordon’s bite) – in fact, that was the reason I first bought it on cassette back in 1991 as a gangly fourteen-year-old. Now, as part of what looks like a real repackaging strategy, Goo is presented as the second four-LP box set in two years (Dirty was the first to get this treatment), complete with an LP-size book and both EP extras and studio outtakes that, if it were silkscreened and pressed in a 200-copy run, might give the FMP vinyl box sets a run for their money. Again we come to the quality of production, which is given the same bell-clear ring that Daydream has, but now remastered in a way as to present that stoney-phone clarity of separation in real space. Pieces like “Dirty Boots” and “Disappearer,” always monumental in their blissed-out intricacy carry it here into a stereo-demonstration level of depth and breadth.
Essentially, Goo is a very deliberate record – more so than Daydream, as there are few if any cases where one gets the feeling that the music seems to be getting away from the players, as ecstatic and powerful as such a vibe might be. Sometimes this deliberateness is to a fault – “Titanium Expose” needed the bit removed from its mouth, but focusing the proceedings grants it weight that would have escaped otherwise. But this deliberateness also yields itself, in the end, to one of Sonic Youth's most perfectly balanced records. “Dirty Boots” is an update of the sprawling landscapes of Daydream’s first two sides, condensed with a slinkier rhythmic approach at its outset and a B section that seems somewhere out of Sister’s thrashier moments, in many ways a summation of “Sonic Youth up to now” – as much as ever could be in a first cut. It wouldn’t be out of line to call the following piece, an afterlife-homage to Karen Carpenter, a more polished take of “Cross the Breeze” with its linear kinetics given over to fame and body-image misfortune. That funky slink is something that wasn’t always obvious on earlier records, but Goo finds it in spades. “Kool Thing” flirts with the sonically retrograde while lyrically progressive – “are you gonna liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?” to Chuck D’s encouraging “Hell yeah” – nearly a fuzzed-out new wave anthem. Ranaldo’s “Mote” might be the best song the Hüskers never wrote, its first half full of characteristic haunted yearning and obsessive forward motion, fleshed out with shimmering electric crepuscles until it abruptly collapses into free-rock sludge that would have fit perfectly on a Mahogany Brain set. “Disappearer” might be the most absolutely gorgeous psychedelic tune that the band – or indeed any of their fuzzbox peers – produced, helped along tremendously by the fact that Moore’s loose-stitch lyrics actually connect in their imagery with the intricate resonance of the music, for the first time in a while lacking in obvious nihilistic tendencies thereby opening up the proceedings significantly. In some ways hearkening back to the orgiastic pummeling of early Gordon-fronted aural megaliths, “Cinderella’s Big Score” and the related “Scooter and Jinx” are essentially orchestrated improvisations to the tune of characters from Raymond Pettibon’s artwork (indeed, “Goo” is also a Pettibon character, and his artwork graces the LP box). As spoiled as it might make one thinking that crisp audio and refractive Fripp-style overlays are necessary to making Goo what it is, the more primitive-sounding rehearsal variants of songs like “Tunic,” while ‘realized’ as complete songs, don’t carry the monumental tapestry that their final takes exhibit (I won’t even go there with the limpid “Disappearer” [a.k.a. “Number One”] outtake). Yet somehow hearing “Dirty Boots” almost collapse on itself several times through the course of a take is a refresher, like most of these rough variants keeping the second half of the band’s moniker intact - a listener’s conundrum indeed. Then there are the covers: “That’s All I Know Right Now,” a dusty drunken glam escapade originally penned by Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine; the Beach Boys’ “I Know There’s an Answer,” and the purposely derivative instrumental “Can Song/The Bedroom,” which somehow transgresses the line between a Soundtracks outtake and something The Golden Earring would’ve recorded.
None of these three records – Goo, Daydream, or Sister – are a definitive slice of Sonic Youth that could be presented as time-capsule worthy on their own, but as a set they mark as clear an evolutionary statement as any in the history of recorded music. Of course, the band have since tried to make similar cohesive sets – the SYR quintet, about which the coolest thing was that their artwork ripped off EMI’s late ‘60s Perspectives Musicales avant-garde series, and then the recent NYC trilogy – but neither of those efforts have the dumbfounded conviction of these sessions. The records that we used as a window onto some other world of sound, that it was possible to have a crateload of uncategorizeable beauty and compelling movement from dissonance, strange tunings and blasts of improvisation controlled or uncontrolled, are to be found here. Many of us would not have known what was possible in creative music without records like Goo. Punkville is ‘here.’
~ Clifford Allen
Posted by clifford on December 1, 2005 8:36 PM.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................