You can love Sonic Youth because they were an integral part of post-punk becoming indie rock becoming alternative rock. You can love Sonic Youth because they were scary, noisy, and eventually even poetic about their noise. You can love Sonic Youth because they were curious about the avant-garde, and their method of preparing their guitars—shoving drumsticks into the fretboard—was inspired by John Cage. You can love Sonic Youth because they laid claim for being the most consistent band during the three decades they were active.
What I love them for is that you get to grow up with them. Art school brats to teenage riots to their young-adult grunge phase, and then they settled down into the suburbs, and raised a family. If you go just a little west of New York City to Hoboken, you get a very similar feel in Yo La Tengo’s discography, who usurped them for claim of most consistent band after Sonic Youth disbanded.
And in a way, I did grow up with them. I was twenty, just getting used to the idea that there was a culture on the internet of rating and writing about music, and found Daydream Nation on a list of records that Pitchfork gave a perfect 10.0 score to (at the time, there weren’t many of them). I had just gotten my first corporate job, with its towering gray cubicle walls and one-hour commutes, and I must have listened to that album every day on the way home to feel cleansed by its strangely-warm noise. A decade later, I wrote what I think is one of my best album reviews about Sister for Tone Glow’s ‘Road Trip’ issue, and I referenced it in my pitch email to Pitchfork to write about Lee Ranaldo’s COVID-inspired EP, one of the last-ever things I ever wrote in my 20s, and one of the first-ever things that was ever published in my 30s. The band means more to me than any other band I can think of.
Sonic Youth were originally part of a New York City-only genre called ‘no wave,’ an off-shoot of post-punk mostly made up of art school types that wanted to make punk music without the technical know-how or didn’t care even if they did. (Like krautrock, no wave is a very location-dependent genre, as many of its players sounded nothing like one another.) But with the exception of early Swans, I think that early Sonic Youth might have been the least-interesting of all the major no wave (oxymoron) acts, because they didn’t go far enough in any particularly direction. Here’s ugly vocals like DNA, but not as ugly; here are Glenn Branca grooves, but not as groovy. The Glenn Branca mention is important, not only because his approach of layering de-tuned guitars would be formative on Sonic Youth’s general sound, but one of his guitarists, Lee Ranaldo, joined Sonic Youth at a time when it was only Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. There was a revolving door of drummers until they met Steve Shelley and solidified their four-piece line-up, whose sturdy chug reminds me very much of trains, like re-imagining krautrock’s motorik beat for one more appropriate with the New York City subway: very few cymbals, very many tom-toms.
None of them were good singers, mind you, a sticking point for some people who simply can’t get into the band. But the three vocalists never pretended to be, and both Ranaldo and Moore found their own lanes and mastered them. Ranaldo relied on beat poetry-inspired lyrics that he mostly spoke-sang, while Moore mostly settled into slacker melodies that were all the rage in mid-90s’ indie. It’s actually Kim Gordon that took the most chances with her voice as their discography went on, often raging, seething, and crying about topics of actual concern, which is why you hear a lot of people thinking she’s the worst of the three. Bullshit. Put it this way: one can imagine her performing Moore’s “Androgynous Mind” but one cannot imagine either Ranaldo or Moore performing “Sweet Shine” or “Drunken Butterfly” or “I Love You Golden Blue.”
Lee Ranaldo contributes, on average, one or two songs per album, making him the George Harrison of the group, which means that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are the Paul McCartney and John Lennon (respectively); that they are the heart of the band. Romantically involved from the get-go, when it came to light that Moore was having extramarital affairs and the couple broke up, the band dissolved with it: there is no Sonic Youth without Thurston Moore, or without Kim Gordon, whereas one could conceivably imagine a Sonic Youth soldiering on without Lee Ranaldo or replacing drummer Steve Shelley.
Their first few records—the Sonic Youth barely-album, Confusion is Sex, and its companion EP Kill Yr. Idols—often feel like exercises of teenage boredom, as in, just dicking around with guitars. I think Thurston Moore naming a song “I Killed Christgau With My Big Fucking Dick” is emblematic of their juvenile attitudes at the time, and yet that the song—retitled “Kill Yr Idols”—just goes “I wanna know why / You wanna impress Christgau / Let that shit die / And find out the new goal” which proves that they were not willing to get confrontational at all as the hardcore peers that Moore worshipped. (That song itself slaps. But it’s a pathetic diss track.) Thurston Moore’s vocals are exceptionally ugly at this time, which makes sense given how integrated he was into punk rock per his recent memoir, Sonic Life, and often feel like he’s imitating a punk singer instead of being punk. There’s a filler noise instrumental that drops—not transitions, just drops—into a lo-fi cover of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” without any of the raw sexuality of the original. (Apparently many were a fan of them covering that song live, including Iggy Pop himself.) “(She’s in A) Bad Mood” has a nice ending where the guitars chirp as the guitarists explore the highest possible frets. It’s often Kim Gordon who shines most, with the cool-sounding “Working youth / Fucking youth” line on “I Dreamed I Dream” while her performance on “Shaking Flesh” makes me think of a young adult baring her soul out in a spoken word performance at a dive bar.
Bad Moon Rising is their last no wave album, and their first good one, with actual care linking the songs together such that the album has flow — and atmosphere. The intro instrumental of Americana guitars—the afternoon before Hallowe’en—strikes a beauty that just wasn’t there on their early records, even as the guitars start groaning and mewling as it segues into the industrial clamor of “Brave Men Run (In My Family).” Closer “Death Valley ‘69” links up with Lydia Lunch of no wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks for vocal ‘harmonies,’ and Lunch is able to tap into an unhinged performance befitting a song about Charles Manson that I don’t think Gordon would have been capable of.
Not to be missed is the “Flower / Hallowe’en” single which was tacked at the end on reissues because both songs—one bruising, one soft, both sinister—are better than the majority of the actual album. “Flower” is my favourite pre-Sister Sonic Youth song, a demonstration of many of the band’s values in three and a half minutes, notably Kim Gordon’s feminism (“Support the flower of women / Use the power of man”), incredible use of profanity (Gordon’s use of “fuck” here and Moore’s use of “bitch” on “Schizophrenia” are among my favourite uses of curse words in all of music), and post-punk grooves that are the natural development from krautrock’s motorik beat. As Moore reveals in his book, the one non-chorus verse of the song was written by Gordon in reference to their relationship, specifically about a nude calendar Moore had in their home (“There's a new girl in your life”) that turned out to be unfortunately prophetic.
Drummer Steve Shelley finally joins the band for EVOL, replacing previous drummers Bob Bert (whose good nature Moore took a lot of advantage of) and Richard Edson. It’s an album that feels like the most transitory of transition albums. What I love about EVOL is what it represents: a counter-culture movement happening in the American 80s’ underground, released in what remains the worst year of popular music ever. You get images of American paraphernalia throughout: The Great Gatsby, Strangers on a Train, Charles Manson, Marilyn Monroe, and Television; even Minutemen’s Mike Watt shows up to assist. In hindsight, the band calling Bad Moon Rising their Americana album doesn’t seem like art -punk types having a laugh. But the only song that I listen to regularly is “Shadow of a Doubt,” where the guitars are plinked in such a way that they sound like an exotic percussion instrument so the song imagines the New York City subway as a jungle. “Expressway to Yr. Skull” is fine, but is hardly the greatest guitar song ever as reported by Neil Young (I can name at least a few Neil Young guitar-heavy songs that are better for starters), and the first bit, the song-y bit, is the most interesting part, particularly for the opening line, “We’re gonna kill the California girls...” which I'll always remember Michael Azerrad describing as a “homicidal twist on a Beach Boys lyric” in Our Band Could Be Your Life. And, of course, “We're going to find the meaning of feeling good / And we're gonna stay there, as long as we think we should,” sung in a vocal too laconic to be hedonistic. But like I said, a transition. I listen to “Expressway” and I hear the extended songs of their late-90s beings essayed; I listen to “In the Kingdom” and I can only hear “Pipeline/Kill Time”; I listen to “Tom Violence” and I can’t help but hear a dry run for “Schizophrenia,” and the oft-quoted “I left home for experience / Carved ‘suck for honesty’ on my chest” rings more and more hollow every time I hear it.
The noise is more potent than ever on Sister, as are the moments of tenderness; running at 38 minutes—almost half the length of their next, more acclaimed album—it’s their tightest, most filler-free album. “Tuff Gnarl” has Moore’s voice rising above the din of guitars to pair together words that you wouldn’t think should go together: “Amazing grazing, strange and raging / Flies are flaring…” to the point that I wish they used that line at least one more time as a chorus (the song doesn’t have one). Despite being a band comprised of three vocalists, they rarely ever used vocal harmonies—potentially signaling their demise, meanwhile Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley continue to sing along with and to one another—but Gordon and Moore give it a whirl on “Cotton Crown,” the closest thing they have to a love song at this point, like two people finding each other right before the apocalypse shreds them to pieces. It’s almost perfect: “Pipeline/Kill Time” owes much to Steve Shelley; Crowns cover “Hot Wire My Heart” feels superfluous; “Beauty Lies in the Eye” doesn’t hold a candle to the preceding two songs, which are both among their very best. “Schizophrenia” has multiple parts but never once feels stitched together, and the outro—“Schizophrenia is taking me home”—has a genuine sadness to it. Meanwhile, “(I Got A) Catholic Block” is top-tier riot music. Though the lyrics are all nonsense (Thurston writes in his memoir that he wanted to tackle religion but also needed to keep it obtuse enough as his views were not the band’s views), they’re delivered convincingly to make you hang on lines like “I just live forever / There just is no end,” and altogether, the nihilism of this record is articulated more succinctly and more powerfully than ever before (“I can’t get laid because everyone is dead”). Heavy smoke clouds rising out of factories, highways to nowhere, debased subway stations, skies turning red.
The skies are not red on Daydream Nation, their most acclaimed album, marking the start of a new era for them as they start streamlining their sound which will eventually lead to a major record deal (though Geffen moved them to their then-new subsidiary DGC, annoying the band). Still turbulent though! Daydream Nation is long at over 70 minutes, aligning it to what the Cure will soon do on Disintegration; both albums have a feel of their respective bands looking at all they achieved in the preceding decade and going even further. There’s no filler this time, not a single song I would remove; not even “Providence,” a much-needed reprise from the non-stop assault of the preceding seven tracks. Near the end of “Providence,” the piano cuts out and you’re left with noise generated from an overheated amp; that’s the ‘theme’ of the album if there is one, which is an urban loneliness and social disconnect. What’s the solution? Teenage riot, of course. Steve Shelley’s drum hits crisper than ever as the songs barrel through extended lengths (it’s a double album in reference to post-hardcore-defining albums by Hüsker Dü and Minutemen just a few years earlier). Meanwhile, Kim Gordon is more articulate about her anger than ever, targeting sleazy corporate male bosses on “Kissability” and consumerism (doubling for prostitution) on “The Sprawl.” Lee Ranaldo hands in three songs this time, more than ever before, including a loving tribute to Joni Mitchell with a guitar part that has a melodic whimsy (Ranaldo has talked at length in interviews about Mitchell’s influence on the band, who looked at alternative tunings as a means to play around her polio-afflicted left hand), and the introduction to “Rain King” is the heaviest moment on the album tied with the noise section of “Candle.” Thurston Moore’s “Silver Rocket” might not be as good as “Catholic Block,” but the intro to “Candle” improves on that of “Tuff Gnarl,” their prettiest guitar segment ever. The best songs are the bookends, long and tuneful “Teenage Riot,” and then short and stomping “Eliminator Jr.” that marches towards the inevitable nowhere.
The cover of Goo is the epitome of alt-rock cool—looks great on a t-shirt—but the album would be the worst Sonic Youth album of the entire decade to come. Curiously, the lyrics mean less than ever; when Thurston Moore goes “I got some dirty boots, bay-bee, dirty boots, HEY!” and brings the opener to its climax, while it sounds good with the band’s increased budget, it also doesn’t register as anything meaningful; “Mary-Christ” is their best punk song, and one of the lines goes “I hope you like hope I hope you like like like you hope that I explode.” In this economy then, Kim Gordon’s “Tunic” stands out most, a dark exploration of Karen Carpenter’s struggles with eating disorders and body image, as does “Kool Thing” to a lesser extent (“Fear of a female planet”), which enlists Public Enemy’s Chuck D in a far better alt-rock/rap crossover than the one R.E.M. made around this time with KRS-One. Unfortunately, the album falls apart in the middle if not for “Disappearer”—“My Friend Goo” is a dumb throwaway; “Mildred Pierce” and “Scooter + Jinx” are even dumber and even more throwaway-er—only to be reclaimed at the end thanks to “Tiatnium Expose”’s riff.
My problem with Nirvana’s Nevermind is that producer Butch Vig’s squeaky-clean production obviously helped it sell millions but also stifled the band compared to live versions of the same songs. By contrast, Butch Vig’s production on Sonic Youth’s Dirty is just as the title says: it’s the best thing to come out of the entire ‘grunge’ genre even if it’s not exactly grunge (because grunge sucks). It’s actually Kim Gordon who carries the album: listing out different girl names as “Swimsuit Issue” slows to a sudden creepy crawl; the guitar lurch-punctuating with her “I love you, I love you”’s on “Drunken Butterfly”; the way she vomits out words in the middle of “Shoot” (a song that plays its hand too early); her summer-daydream vibe of “Crème Brûlée.” Moore’s best songs are the singles, slide guitar squealing on “100%” which ends with a instrumental ride out for the ages, and bass-heavy “Youth Against Fascism” whose “Yeah, the president sucks / He’s a war pig fuck” sounds bad-ass and relevant forevermore. Cut out the chaff—at 15 songs, it has the most number of Sonic Youth songs of any album—including one minute “Nic Fit” Untouchables cover, and “Theresa’s Sound-World” (excellent noise sections but otherwise an early attempt at the poetry-inspired verses that Moore will do better later on; the best part if the title), and you’d have a stronger album. Sonic Youth go commercial on their own terms, which is to say, not commercial at all, much to their label’s dismay; with Sonic Youth having been the ones to bring Nirvana to DGC’s attention, I bet DGC was hoping for Nevermind 2.0 and ultimately got better Goo 2.0 instead.
Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star scares away some poseurs—possibly from the words ‘experimental’ and ‘trash’ in the title alone, the latter a reference to the New York Dolls song—an album that does away with Goo’s and Dirty’s half-hearted attempts of going mainstream while still retaining their songiness. It’s also as eclectic as this non-eclectic band ever got, with Moore starting off with a lo-fi acoustic blues song (“Winner’s Blues”), or later doing an Iggy Pop imitation that’s far more demented than Iggy ever got (“Androgynous Mind”); the latter really tries to empathize with a trans person in 1994 (“Hey sad angel walks, and he talks like a girl / Out trying to think why it stinks, he's not a girl), the “Hey, hey, it’s okay”’s feel like they’re singing to themselves to believe it as much as Moore is singing it to them. Once again, Gordon wins on the album (Lee Ranaldo wasn’t even given a chance this time, alas) thanks to “Bull in the Heather” and “Sweet Shine.” The former has a moment at the 0:40 mark where another guitar locks into the song with a whimsical melody that sounds like something out of an old arcade game, booted on for the first time in years, and the scraps of guitar in the intro underneath the pings are strange and anxious; the latter has always been one of the band’s most optimistic songs (not happy, just optimistic) thanks to what would be Kim Gordon’s best-ever vocal performance until a decade later where she would out-do herself.
Washing Machine sprawls out for the first time since Daydream Nation. It’s their most suburban album, and should have been named The Hissing of Summer Lawns had Joni Mitchell not already claimed that title. “The Diamond Sea” might be their most pretty song, and Thurston Moore’s touching lines “Sail into the heart of the lonely storm / And tell her that you’ll love her eternally” are clearly written with his daughter Coco in mind, born just the year before. Unlike Bad Moon Rising, EVOL or Goo, the album hits its stride in the middle starting with the title track (“Yeah, I take my baby down to the street, and I buy him a soda pop,” Gordon sings, in a young, playful register, and then the song takes strange turns as if it the band were reimagining Patti Smith’s “Land of Horses”), then “Unwind,” the most summer hammock of songs ever written, and then the Shangri-Las-referencing “Little Trouble Girl,” giving indie fans what they’ve dreamt about in a Kim Gordon-Kim Deal duet that is also the least rocking song on the albu. Alas, the album patters out after that: “No Queen Blues” is memorable for its climax, a trick pulled out of L.A. punk band X’s book; there’s a filler instrumental that functions of a reprise of the first song, and my most blasphemous of takes on this band is that the praise for “The Diamond Sea” is bewildering to me: the melody of the song component is really simple, and the noise section is not as profound as ones that could be found on their next album.
A Thousand Leaves was not well-received which makes no sense: “Hits of Sunshine” and “Karen Koltrane” feel like the noise epics that the band tested out on “The Diamond Sea,” but achieving more in less the time. The album reminds me that Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center only allowed Jimi Hendrix to record Band of Gypsys there on the condition that he emphasized a “symphonic or an otherwise classical approach.” He did not deliver. But Sonic Youth do exactly that here. With Kim Gordon switching from bass to guitar, there’s now three guitars, and the results contextualize Glenn Branca’s multi-guitar assault into decidedly anti-pop songs (whereas they previous contextualized Branca into effectively pop songs). The album dispenses away with any ‘conventional’ song structure early on by getting the single “Sunday” out of the way relatively early. For the first time ever on a Sonic Youth album the best songs are both Lee Ranaldo’s, one short (“Hoarfrost”) and one long (“Karen Koltrane”); both touching. Moore gets silver, again, one short (“Sunday”) and one long (“Hits of Sunshine”). “Hits” might seem like filler with how the noise doesn’t ‘go anywhere’ but it’s ambient bliss that has meant much to me over the years, and the return to the verse afterwards was always been touchingly cathartic. Moore uses the same weird whisper singing method on “Snare Girl,” a pretty lullaby that should have closed the album. Kim fairs the worst, and because she hands in five songs, she has more than Moore or Ranaldo; of those, “Contre le sexisme” and “Heather Angel” are both filler (which unfortunately bookend the album), but “Female Mechanic Now on Duty” is not to be missed; structurally, it’s “Washing Machine” again, but the grind of the riff makes it sound like she’s a (female) mechanic (now) on duty.
Cut “Small Flowers Crack Concrete” and “Lightnin,’” and NYC Ghosts & Flowers would make a fine EP; the former reaches for what the beat poets were doing and falls flat. As it stands, the record deserves better than being one of a handful that received the 0.0 treatment by Pitchfork—it’s a good album. (There are many records that I hate viscerally, but I’ve never come across a piece of art that I thought was worthy of nothing, and yet, this was an era of that website that many remember fondly. Go figure.) The guitar pings on “Free City Rhymes”—hey-o! thanks for reading!—bring to mind highway streetlamps all lit up at night well before Moore starts evoking them in one of his best slacker-soul performances; the noise section, pure shattered glass, feels like an entire city crumpling behind him in the rearview, as if to say that this was the start of a new era for Sonic Youth. The choruses of Gordon’s “Nevermind (What Was It Anyway)” get some derision, but her appeal was always making good out of bad singing and bad lyrics, and her songs have always been of a similar theme, a woman playing a man’s game for audiences full of men. NYC Ghosts & Flowers would be their first album with assistance from Chicago prolific producer Jim O’Rourke, who joined the band as a full-fledged member on their next two albums and ultimately—and I hate to say this because I love his work—didn’t do as much for the band as you’d think: shouldn’t there be more guitar interplay with an additional guitarist, instead of less?
My personal theory is that the negative reception of NYC Ghosts & Flowers made them lean on a safer sound for their last few albums. Murray Street was written in response to 9/11, and yet any grief feels vague (i.e. not actually there), and songs just enter noisy sections without any sense of danger or dynamic, especially when you compare them to “Free City Rhymes” or “Karen Koltrane” (Ranaldo even has a song named “Karen Revisited,” asking you compare). “The Empty Page” feels so bland compared to “Sunday”; tuneful, shuneful. Sonic Nurse is better even though it lags in the middle; the guitar interplay of opener “Pattern Recognition” feels like a rekindling after Jim O’Rourke helped mellow them out last time. The best two songs are the last two: “I Love You Golden Blue” is a stunning performance from Kim Gordon, straining her voice and redefining what ‘blue-eyed soul’ actually could be, while “Peace Attacks” feature some of the best guitars-as-keyboards that I’ve ever heard
Rather Ripped was enjoyable by 2006’s standards but hasn’t aged well, particularly because Moore and Gordon’s relationship at the time has come to light in her honest autobiography, Girl in a Band, and on that record, Thurston was blatantly flaunting how how much sex he was having behind Gordon’s back on “Sleepin’ Around” (whereas the previous album’s “Unmade Bed,” also clearly autobiographical in hindsight, at least feigns empathy). The first two songs are a strong offering that demonstrate Youth’s relatively marginal move to be more accessible than ever (but didn’t they already essay that about four times by this point?), and there are pretty guitar harmonics on “Do You Believe in Rapture?” and the intro to “Pink Steam,” but you can find those on any Sonic Youth album. Sonic Youth returned back to an indie label for what would be their final album, The Eternal, unfortunately, their most boring album since their debut with the opening two tracks (both from Gordon) being the exception. Closer “Massage the History” feels like a conscious attempt to remake “I Love You Golden Blue” but without nearly as much emotional weight.
That’s their core studio discography. There are extras, none of which are essential to the band’s legacy. The Whitey Album was released shortly after Daydream Nation under the name Ciccone Youth in reference to Madonna, as Madonna was first getting started around the same time as New York City post-punk, and the band had met her during that time. A lot of it feels like they’re just taking the piss, indicated by shoving a 1-minute track of silence as the second goddamn song, and a song about two girls talking over a sample of Neu! quite literally called “Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu.” Thurston Moore was very curious about hip-hop and sampling (and on the live album Walls Have Ears, deployed a sample of Jesus and the Mary Chain that was sped up into pure noise so the band could switch guitars), but it never amounted to anything more than a side hobby. In/Out/In is a collection of songs recorded between 2000-2010 that feel like jams considering that they are almost purely instrumental which proves that they were b-sides: the band disliked that loaded term.
They launched Sonic Youth Recordings as a label with the intent to release their own records and those of their friends that didn’t have to endure the scrutiny of ravenous fans and fickle critics. SYR 4: Goodbye 20th Century was a collection of covers tributing the avant-garde, mostly New York City composers, and even an 18-second Yoko Ono track, and SYR 9: Simon Werner a disparu is a soundtrack that contains the elegant piano-based ballad “Les Anges Au Piano” that I like more than anything from The Eternal, and “Alice Et Simon” feels like it could have been a potent little rock track had they wrote vocals for it.
The live albums I’ve heard from Sonic Youth expose a band that was subtly relying on the studio as an instrument. For example, the band rushes through “Bull in the Heather” on Battery Park, NYC: July 4th 2008—a ‘hits’-filled track-list leaning heavy on Daydream Nation—but are unable to tap into the song's masterful buildup of tension. Meanwhile, live albums like Smart Bar: Chicago 1985 and the just-released Walls Have Ears capture the band in transition, testing out “Expressway to Yr Skull” while touring Bad Moon Rising. Though there’s been great care taken to clean up the recordings, they are ultimately still not as clear as the studio version. The latter, recorded over multiple nights in London and Brighton (hence the renaming of “Making the Nature Scene” into “Blood On Brighton Beach”), seemed unlikely to ever be released in any official capacity as it was originally a bootleg released without the band’s consent.
I should like Thurston Moore’s solo albums, but I don’t beyond a song here or there—the 20-minute instrumental “Elegy for All the Dead Rock Stars” closing out Psychic Hearts where Steve Shelley’s drums get downright jazzy in the middle; the foreboding strings underpinning the same ol’ chords on “Frozen GTR” from Trees Outside the Academy—because most of the main ones feel like Sonic Youth albums without the benefit of hearing Kim Gordon’s or Lee Ranaldo’s voice putting his increasingly-boring slacker melodies into relief, especially since he continued to work with Steve Shelley. The shorter songs from Psychic Hearts feel like Experimental Jet Set leftovers. Meanwhile, The Best Day’s ringing opener “Speak to the Wild” just slams out of its noise section into song section without any care, and proves that no matter what kind of indie supergroup Thurston Moore would form (in that case, with My Bloody Valentine’s bassist Debbie Googe and Nought’s guitarist James Sedwards), it still ended up sounding like Sonic Youth. 2011’s Demolished Thoughts was an outlier, a folksy record produced by Beck, testing the waters on making another Sea Change before pulling trigger a few years later with Morning Phase. Demolished Thoughts has a surface-level sweetness with the string and harp arrangements, but the record feels like a 50-year old man singing love songs to his mistress, which according to Kim Gordon, is exactly what it was.
Perhaps predictably, Lee Ranaldo mellowed out the most of the three principal songwriters-vocalists. Between the Times and the Tides feels like an album that’s very cautiously testing the waters of what it means to be a singer/songwriter after so many experimental noise albums, and it’s very heavy on references to the rock pantheon: opener “Waiting on a Dream” lifts its riff from Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black,” and the closer references one of the most famous album closers of all time in its title. Electric Trim has perhaps the best solo song of any of them in the winding “Moroccan Mountains” (“YEP! YEP!”), but the album doesn’t keep the fire going, and the choruses of the following “Uncle Skeleton” are very obnoxious, and the album very much feels like its close to hour-long run-time. Kim Gordon has been the least prolific of the three, but her solo debut No Home Record decidedly did not sound like Sonic Youth but instead, looked at what was happening in contemporary music for influence, namely Death Grips, and so I think the album is far braver than what Moore has been up to.
I’ll be visiting New York City again this year—it’ll be my fourth time in that incredible city—so expect more write-ups on some of NYC’s best artists. I’ll be sure to steal some time to myself to wander the streets, queuing up Daydream Nation and getting lost in its intoxicating hum for the billionth time.
Sonic Youth - B-
Confusion Is Sex - B
Bad Moon Rising - B+
Sister - A+
Daydream Nation - A+
Goo - B+
Dirty - A-
Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star - A-
Washing Machine - A-
A Thousand Leaves - A
NYC Ghosts & Flowers - B+
Murray Street - B
Sonic Nurse - B+
Rather Ripped - B-
The Eternal - B-
Yr. original Sonic Youth Ranked and Reviewed got me into the band when I was 17 back in the pandemic - as a 21-year-old now, a corporate job at 20 sounds inconceivable, no wonder Daydream Nation had such an effect on you - and so thanks to you, no other band has meant more to me over the last few years. It was nice to see you'd rewritten things and added more (!! makes me wonder if you have any of those other old lists, particularly your fantastic 2010s list which basically soundtracked my first couple months of university) but (admitting some bias) I still agree with more or less everything you say. Rather relieved that you don't give much indication to return to the SYR recordings, but curious to hear some of the cherries you picked from them (haven't gone near either much since Thurston's Rock & Roll Consciousness bored me to tears, although Kim's weird rage stuff the last couple months has been fun). Glad to see you've kept this substack going and the articles popping up in my inbox have all been nice surprises. Re: the OPN one, I urge you to keep revisiting Again if you haven't -- tempted to call it the best full-length he's done in ten years! Yeah, the vocals still suck but 'On An Axis' might be the best thing I heard from 2023. Glad to see he's managed to make these mishmash LPs cohere and glad to know you called out the mostly-rubbish MOPN, even if in the COVID months I found its failures and struggles pretty fascinating. Still need to get around to the ECM list but happy In Movement has stuck around for you - I love that one! Wishing you all the best of luck in yr. future writing too -- personally I'll be keeping my ear out for a long time. - J
nice long read, marshall :)