The Formative Years - Sonic Youth
My relationship with Sonic Youth is an interesting one in that I have been listening to them since the early 1990s and while I never not appreciated them for carving their own niche by redefining what could be done with guitars via their unorthodox tunings, as a juvenile delinquent I found them a tad too tame sonically to wave my pom poms for them in public, especially after they experienced mainstream success.
It was not until 2011 when triggered by learning about the divorce of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore that I made a deliberate effort to dive into their back catalogue only to realise what a brilliant, trailblazing band it was and how vitally important they were for what was to become labelled as noise rock.
Formed in 1981, they released their debut 7” on Neutral Records - a fairly conventional effort even by post-punk standards. Following tours and osmosis with the Swans, things started to get interesting with their Confusion is Sex album and the subsequent Kill Yr Idols EP, which saw them taking a deliberate detour into louder, more dissonant territory.
Following a fairly successful tour of Europe, 1985 saw the release of the album Bad Moon Rising, which in essence sounds like a dedicated drawn-out artsy jam session with Americana being the common denominator theme-wise.
Their debut on SST Records, i.e., EVOL, saw Sonic Youth starting to refine their DNA: Darker and more in charge of channeling their alchemy to make it more immediate and tense yet interweaved with glitter-poppy parts and raw instrumental bits. There is an intriguing, underlying unease which throughout the album builds up and eventually culminates in a seven-minute-long cacophonous noise crescendo.
Fast forward to 1990 and the release of Goo, their major label debut with the iconic Raymond Pettibon cover artwork, which saw them expand on alt-rock stylings and becoming more accessible without alienating their core fan base.
By utilizing and recontextualizing recorded sounds as raw material, fragmenting and merging it with their trademark knack for tonal elasticity and reconciling it all with garage-punk’s structural conventions. It is one of my favourite alternative rock albums and is still a pleasure to listen to back-to-back thirty years later.
