It feels like there’s a bit of a resurgence of the double album at the moment. Here, Sonic Youth continue on their journey of alt-rock noise. I wasn’t as interested in Sister as I was in EVOL, this one feels like a return to their original form even though the overall sound is slightly softer in rather than the harsh scratchy kind of distortion on EVOL.
Like the recent Metallica double album, this is a double album mainly because it features some lengthy tracks (most coming in either side of 7 minutes) - another Seventies throwback – that allows Thurston Moore and Co. the opportunity to create lush spacious soundscapes.
Silver Rocket starts a little like Hawkwind’s Motorhead (the title possibly a homage to Silver Machine), before turning into noise from which the beat eventually emerges again; also a very Hawkwind thing. And once I’d got that idea in my head, the comparisons to Hawkwind kept coming. There are lengthy, fuzzy noise tracks about science fiction themes, mainly based on William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels including The Sprawl based on the idea of mega-cities (compare and contrast with e.g. Hawkwind’s High Rise based on the JG Ballard story).
This in turn made me realise how old Gibson’s work is now, and that the likes of the Shadowun RPG was released in 1989 – yikes! I think The Cure’s Disintegration came out around this time too (maybe in a year or two) and again there’s a similar feel, of long tracks that turn into spacey riff-driven noise-jams.
It’s not all of the space-rock kind of noise, though. The track Total Trash has a bit of a Ramones punk feel to it with the surf-rock chord progressions that the bleed into an off-key riff, and then disintegrate into discordant noise, then re-emerge to the tune via a detour into an industrial grind. Vocal duties, as before, rotate between Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, and Lee Ranaldo, each one bringing a slightly distant feel to the proceedings.
I really liked this one, probably Sonic Youth’s best so far, and I didn’t even get Side Three Slump from it, which is always a good sign for a double album. It’s interesting how I used to love this kind of noise-rock back at around the late Eighties the first time round and, unlike some other aspects of my musical taste, this one doesn’t seem to have changed.
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