9/7/2023 0 Comments Superstar sonic youth rym![]() ![]() The brief moment at 1:49, where everything else drops out, leaving drummer Steve Shelley – a talent sometimes under-appreciated in the rush to praise the band’s radical approach to guitar playing – thundering away is just fantastic. You can hear the influence of grunge on the riff of 100%, a feedback-strafed eulogy for murdered friend Joe Cole. The lengthy intro is sublime the deft switches from something approaching straightforward alt-rock to explosions of noisy avant guitar are stunning. The lyrics of Candle defy explication – look online and you can find people suggesting they’re about everything from the purity of love to crystal meth addiction – but it hardly matters. The Manson murders had hung over rock music for 15 years by the time Sonic Youth recorded Death Valley ’69, a ferocious, viscerally powerful song written from the fractured point of view of a Manson Family member: the bloody, zero-budget video – by transgressive director Richard Kern – is the perfect accompaniment. Sonic Youth’s response to 9/11 offers a simple but affecting plea for unity in the face of horror: “Gather round, gather friend, never fear, never again.” The music, meanwhile, evokes the ghosts of New York’s past: there are moments where the guitars entwine around each other in a way that distinctly recalls Television. Sonic Youth at Pukkelpop festival, Belgium, 1991. Its understated power is exemplified by the languid, Pavement-influenced Sweet Shine, disrupted by Gordon’s sudden shift to throat-shredding howl midway through. Sweet Shine (1994)Īpparently recorded over the master tape of 1987’s Sister, Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star was a defiantly subdued, refusenik gesture in the wake of the post-Nirvana alt-rock gold rush. As Anti-Orgasm grippingly proves – spiky, clashing guitars heaving, monotonal riff beautiful, off-beam coda – it couldn’t have been the work of anyone else. Sonic Youth’s final album, The Eternal, might have been the most straightforward they ever released, but then again, that’s a relative term. It starts out like jerky post-punk funk, then suddenly transforms: an unsettling Kim Gordon monologue over brooding, tense, detuned guitar noise. ![]() Thrillingly, you can almost hear the band finding themselves as Shaking Hell plays. ![]() Sonic Youth’s first full album, Confusion Is Sex, was an abrasive leap forward from their awkward, half-formed debut EP. ![]()
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