speakers scream the same

We get older every year; Japan and Sonic Youth has some history between them going some way back, it seems, Lee Ranaldo reminiscing midway through the gig that they first played in Tokyo 20 years ago. An unseasonably festive atmosphere of rapt anticipation greeted these underground music veterans, and we weren’t short-changed – it didn’t quite have the feel of 1988-the-year-daydream-nation-broke transcendence, but for 67 minutes of revisionism genius it might as well have been. Experimental sound forms may be their lifeblood, but the sonic hardware from the recent The Eternal is more custom-made for enormous noise and blown speakers, the waves of mainlining guitar radiance they conjure up on new numbers like “Calming The Snake” and “Anti-Orgasm” are the stuff of forthright non-subjective joy. (Most rock dudes sound like real idiots saying shit like “Sonic Youth want all of you to have sex tonight”, as Thurston Moore did before kicking into the big dumb rock of “Anti-Orgasm”, but because it’s Sonic Youth and they did a Sister-era “Stereo Sanctity” that fucking blew your mind just ten minutes earlier and seriously left you believing you heard some otherworldly melodic noise you never heard before in your life, you let it slip as another one of those iffy propositions.) As with most things Sonic Youth, their performance spoke the language of despicably city-cool rock and roll, as epitomized by the hazy shades of electric blue on “Antenna” which the band seem to able to fearlessly stretch and bend at will.

(Setlist)
Sacred Trickster
No Way
Calming The Snake
Stereo Sanctity
Hey Joni
Anti-Orgasm
Poison Arrow
Antenna
Leaky Lifeboat
What We Know
Massage The History
Death Valley 69

into the electric mist

This might surprise a little, though it really shouldn’t, but I think The Eternal is quite possibly the most succinctly expressive album in the three-decade career of Sonic Youth in many respect. (Well, stranger things have come to be.)

Okay, it’s not quite nearing the defining glory of Daydream Nation (1988) or even the nuanced quality of Murray Street (2002) but it’s still a really good record and simply put, rock musicians of their vintage that actually manage to stay as vital or as inexhaustibly creative as them are quite a dwindling niche these days anyway. Package the ultra-melodic pop traction of Rather Ripped (their 2006 album that preceded this new one, also their last on Geffen/DGC) into tidier, more lethal capsules, and you’ll come some way to breathing in the rarefied air of The Eternal.

With The Eternal, their first on Matador Records, Sonic Youth have now got 16 full-length albums under their belt and enough experience to comfortably revel in the sweet hereafter of fractured sounds and distortion like it’s second nature. Quite contrary to their elder statesmen image, throbbing tracks like “Sacred Trickster” and “Poison Arrow” still have all the quickfire immediacy of the undisciplined garage punks (Stooges, MC5, The Germs) that Sonic Youth identifies with.

“Leaky Lifeboat (For Gregory Corso)” highlights the art-schooled iconoclastic side of these NYC lifers, shards of addictive noise riding on Thurston Moore’s streams of consciousness. On the snarly “No Way”, apparently the first song written for the album, the interlocking guitars pack the seismic force of a murder of crows loitering at the frontiers of an electric mist. The effect of this inspired simplicity is invigorating, enough to hit the road with raw remembrances of teenage riots. “It’s been quite a ride, with you my sweet here by my side,” Lee Ranaldo sings sarcastically in the demeanor of the latest toughs on “What We Know” while a clanging guitar rings in the background like a viciously detuned clarion call.

Likewise on The Eternal, Sonic Youth has taken the time to register new dimensions to this other meditative side of their songcraft that comes into the reckoning more as they mature as musicians. Thurston’s free-associative slow jam “Antenna” is given a gorgeous rendition that fits in thematically with the loose and yet focused vibes of the album in general, and Lee’s complementary “Walkin Blue” takes The Eternal into a milieu of confusion mixed with a sense of numbed contentment.

Be it in snapshot miniatures or in thick sonic spleens, The Eternal wells with such beautifully familiar elements. Taking cues from the album title, these are songs that operate from outside the enclaves of time and their intent is perhaps best surmised in the ten-minute closer “Massage The History”, a Kim Gordon dream vehicle where realms of illusion and the seeming melt into one another in grand chaotic fashion.

sonic-youth forever

plumb the feedback

For some reasons, I feel a bit compelled to try and keep up with the pace of posting here this month, whatever works. So again I’m recycling old stuff, this one written sometime back in 2007. I just bought my copy of The Eternal this morning; Sonic Youth is still amazing (more on that later of course). One afterthought about this gig review: I did not mention that former Pavement member Mark Ibold was on stage with the band in Shanghai that night, mainly because I somehow did not recognize him (embarrassing because I love Pavement too), and he’s now the latest official Sonic Youth member.

Jams blasting free

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crimes and gangs forgivable means of escape. – Federico Garcia Lorca

I have been a Sonic Youth fan for fuck-knows how long but watching them performing a bunch of songs I already know by heart in the triply crawlspace that is Shanghai, the colossal city which I will always have a love-hate relationship with, still gave me a sense of familiar unreality that is absolutely thrilling, the nostalgic surge inside the heart when the well-worn, chiming guitar intros to "Candle" rolls along right at the start of their performance. These veterans have soldiered on extraordinarily through an exemplary career – name me another gang of forty-fifty somethings who could kick it this hard – and few other bands old or new are as blessed with their ability to meld pop aesthetics with avant-rock instincts.

This was supposed to be a historical milepost in their long career trajectories too, Sonic Youth’s first two shows in the Republic of China (they played earlier in Beijing the night before).

And we had the additional benefit that they are touring behind one of their most pop-savvy albums in Rather Ripped (helps too that it has a high quotient of quality Kim Gordon songs) and while their set is saddled stitched to perfection, they were still able to throw in a few sonic surprises. Like making us wait till four songs in before launching into the frightening distortion vistas of "Mote" – and how they did it was spectacular, Thurston Moore skyscraping his gear while Lee Ranaldo punish the length of his guitar wire for effects, an ocean of furious freewheeling jams amplified to a perilous pitch. From there, the band doused the fire by segueing immediately into the clear-blue reverie of "Do You Believe in Rapture?", a performance that also hits home the truth for me that Sonic Youth’s underrated melodic finesse really does come through most brilliantly in a live setting.

Somewhere in between the newer Ripped songs and revisits to old classics from Sister and Daydream Nation (their blistering-fast version of "Silver Rocket" was particularly rad, with the velocities raised to almost revulsion levels I shit you not), they found room for a few oddities like a hard-boiled rendition of Lee’s "Skip Tracer", the only song they played from Washing Machine. Nothing’s sacred in their hands, it seems: right before playing the crowd pleasing "100%", a crass-sounding Chinese pop song came on the sound system while Thurston’s guitar feedback bubbled angrily all over the transmission.

As Sonic Youth tunneled towards the end of their set with the breathlessly long gauze of "Pink Steam", their unbridled enthusiasm is clear as they returned for two encores to round up two hours of thunderous bliss. They are still shaking hell, alright – superfreaky memories are made of these.

silence kit #7

Sonic Youth
NYC Ghost & Flowers [Geffen, 2000]
Murray Street [Geffen, 2002]
Sonic Nurse [Geffen, 2004]

“Smiling beatific roommates, from dust to dust they create rock n roll”, so to quote Thurston Moore’s lyrics on “Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style” from one of these three albums (Murray Street, actually) that have been invariably referred to as the New York trilogy. The song, with its evocation of art-noise anxiety and puerile punk exhortations, is also as good an anthem (or elderly statesmen statement) as any for Sonic Youth to break cover on another extraordinary cycle of their long, near-mythical record-making career, the band poised as ever in laying down the gauntlet for younger musicians.

For better or for worse, these three albums also happen to be the ones instantaneously associated with the time Jim O’Rourke clocked in with the band. And for all the believable rhetoric crediting the Chicago musician/producer’s brief stint with revitalizing the four original band members (unnecessarily in my view unless you can pinpoint to me the parts on which O’Rourke made crucial contribution to their sound or makeup – I can’t), one should also be mindful that Sonic Youth very seldom lacked in terms of musical vocabulary.

But let’s begin by kicking this shit back to 2000. In retrospect, the much maligned NYC Ghost & Flowers seems to hold up a bit better today than when it was first released but taken as a whole, the album while nice enough doesn’t quite measure up to the other two showpieces in the trilogy. The Thurston Moore pieces, “Free City Rhymes” and “Small Flowers Crack Concrete” specifically, deftly match bohemian beat poetry to impressionistic melodic hazes, while Lee Ranaldo’s frighteningly good title track composition builds beautifully from Lee’s wintry wails of echo-canyon soundscaping into its final two minutes of shattering chaos. Elsewhere the music was less impressive – for all the rickety guitar jams on the record, it felt like the band was interested only in providing clues t0 the small secret currents stacked in NYC Ghost & Flowers.
Moore himself had described these records as “spirit-like, architectural, and humanitarian”, and the subsequent Murray Street and Sonic Nurse, especially when taken together, do much justification to this interpretation. Where the broad palette of futuristic free forms of NYC Ghost & Flowers is delivered in a disjointed fashion rather on purpose, the more focused Murray Street mined the band’s newfound subtleties from micro perspectives, resulting in streams of lilting guitars wizened with rocky ruminations.

Either mewling in songs like “Karen Revisited” and “Sympathy For The Strawberry” that stretch with ease from spells of soft hidden energies to controlled feedback abuse within their ten-minute frames or running through short spurts of punk menace (“Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style”; Kim Gordon’s terrific “Plastic Sun”), the songs on Murray Street flicker by like mysterious montage visions of cross-country kinetics. Released post-911 and the album title perhaps a slight reference to the passenger plane engine that crashed right onto Murray Street, I can only speculate that the devastated landscape affected the course and urgency of the album osmotically.

Cut-rate surrealism is again the prescriptive order on Sonic Nurse, which probably features the most diverse spread of sounds, styles and influences. William Gibson on “Pattern Recognition”. The subdued chiming on “I Love You Golden Blue” tapping into the atmospheric rock tuning that is then the emblem of emerging experimental bands like Animal Collective and Black Dice. The snare of loose-limbed improvisations on “Dripping Dream” echoing free jazz. The languid “Peace Attack” reaffirming their slight interest in the spiritual regeneration mode first hinted on 1998’s A Thousand Leaves. Remarkably the manifold sound and fury comes together seamlessly on Sonic Nurse, at the same time giving the sense that the songs had or followed a certain logic only Sonic Youth are privy to. And not a bad way to cap off a trilogy indeed, before 2007’s Rather Ripped (an excellent album too, and their final release on Geffen) rock-ferried the band back to more familiar grounds.