Following on from my comments on the previous Sonic Youth album, I needn’t have been intimidated by them at all, they’re a bunch of pussycats compared to some. This album feels like a transitional form between the dark New Wave of the likes of Echo & the Bunnymen, and the more outright noise-indie of the likes of Ride. Comparisons are again inevitable to those grandparents of noise-rock, The Velvet Underground.
There are some similarities to The Fall as well, especially the way that Thurston Moore tends to do “musical monotone intonation” more than singing, in the style of like Mark E Smith (but without the plastic megaphone effect). The track Pipeline uniquely has Lee Ranaldo on vocals with some great psychedelic warped guitar. Elsewhere, Kim Gordon does vocal lead on what tend to be the more spacey songs that work with her breathier voice. Pacific Coast Highway, for example, which very nicely evokes the feeling driving along a (surprisingly) Pacific Coast highway, an oddly sunny idea for the band.
The album cover names them as “The” Sonic Youth, which amused me with the idea applying the definite article to band names that really don’t have them - “The Anthrax”, “The Oasis” and so on. I found this album largely unremarkable, and looking back at my avoidance of this group back in the early Nineties, I think I probably would have pretended to like it more than I did, again with the idea of fitting in. It’s fine, don’t get me wrong, but I thought the previous one was more interesting. I think there’s at least one more Sonic Youth album to come, which I suspect will be better as it feels like the band here are reaching for a sound that they don’t quite achieve, but will in time.
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