![]() ![]() Recorded by ultimate Fall fan boy the late John Peel for his radio program in 1988, the EP’s title made reference to Mark E. I tend to agree with my pal Jay, who happily wrote them off as producers of “Artless art rock no-hook no wave dada for doofi.”īut every thorn has its rose, and it was only recently that I discovered 1990’s “4 Tunna Brix,” a Sonic Youth EP consisting of covers of Fall songs (or in the case of “Victoria, a cover of a Fall cover of a Kinks song). The bottom line is that while I can usually find a couple of decent songs on any given Sonic Youth LP-“Mildred Pierce,” “Hot Wire My Heart,” “Sugar Kane,” and “Brave Men (Run in My Family,” to say nothing of such non-album covers as the Carpenters’ “Superstar” and Bob Dylan’s “I’m Not There”-for the most part I can take ‘em or leave ‘em, with my preference being the latter. Maple anything thanks to their vocalist Al Johnson, who was not only compelling but also downright creepy in a Sammy Johns’ “Chevy Van” kind of way. Maple’s deconstructionist tendencies could, I suppose, cause it to be placed under the art umbrella. In short, unlike Sonic Youth, which released a song “Audience” that sounds like cows goose stepping on 2006’s An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music, most of my favorite noise rock bands don’t have an avant-garde bone in their bodies, although the defunct U.S. Shannon Selberg of Cows didn’t develop his extraordinary bugle skills by listening to Steve Reich, John Cage or, god forbid, Yoko Ono he just picked the thing up and started blowing on it. Whereas the noise bands I like (Killdozer, Cows, The Jesus Lizard, U.S. They’re serious about their place in the avant-garde, and one gets get the idea they spend hours at a time listening to experimental artists of the past and present, and would succumb to sheer elitist mortification if forced to listen to a Kix album. Neither Gordon nor Shelley is capable of projecting emotion they’re machines who have placed their faith in other machines-namely their guitars-and the front man be damned.īut an even bigger problem with Sonic Youth is that they play art-noise, and that art part rankles. It wasn’t until 1988’s Daydream Nation, that accessible masterpiece, that I finally found I could listen to them without shouting, “Write a real song! Quit being so “kool”! And don’t ever let Kim Gordon sing!” (Which she unfortunately does on “My Friend Goo” off 1990’s Goo, with hilariously horrifying results.) Indeed, one of Sonic Youth’s big problems, for me anyway, has always been their lack of a front person with even an iota of charisma. ![]() They were simply too humorless and NYC No Wave (as in “let’s make a pretentious and formless din!”) for my particular noise rock tastes. For a long time the only song of theirs I could stomach was “Death Valley ‘69,” and then only because it was about everybody’s favorite foster child provider, Charles Manson. ![]()
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