Sound bite: "Sonic Youth"

Sonic Youth “Sonic Youth” Geffen
Records Ciccone Youth “The Whitey
Album” Geffen Records Thurston Moore
“Psychic Hearts” Geffen Records The lens
through which most view Sonic Youth emerged in the early
’90s, shortly after the New York-based noise-rock titans
signed with Geffen Records. The label attempted to push Sonic Youth
into the mainstream and market them as part of the “Grunge
Explosion.” For the most part, the group never popularly
caught on. But to dismiss this as being the full story of the most
influential independent band of the ’80s is to ignore a bold
legacy of spontaneity and experimentation. In three reissues by
Geffen Records, the dimensions of Sonic Youth that make the whole
enterprise work are all on display. One of the main things for
which Sonic Youth gained early notoriety was a willingness to
experiment with alternative guitar tunings, though Thurston Moore
and Lee Ranaldo didn’t simply sit around messing with
dropped-D tuning like a couple of nu-metalheads in Pocatello,
Idaho. Instead, they continually purchased cheap guitars and
experimented with them like a never-ending supply of scratch paper.
Moore and Ranaldo tried any manner of getting unique sounds out of
these instruments, including jamming screwdrivers between strings
on the fretboard. The resulting sounds proved to be as compelling
as they were ear-piercing. As Michael Azerrad writes in his book
“Our Band Could Be Your Life,” “Bang a drumstick
on a cheap Japanese Stratocaster copy in the right tuning, crank
the amplifier to within an inch of its life, and it will sound like
church bells.” This outside-the-lines thinking showed
musicians that awesome walls of sound could be squeezed out of even
the sorriest instruments. “When you tuned a guitar a new way,
you were a beginner all over again and you could discover all sorts
of new things,” Ranaldo once said. “It allowed us to
throw out a whole broad body of knowledge about how to play the
guitar.” With that in mind, perhaps the best way to describe
Sonic Youth’s eponymous debut EP is through the following
equation: No-Wave + Avant-Garde Noise + Smothered Vocals = Awkward.
On “She’s Not Alone,” the band tosses a plethora
of instruments around, including tribal drums, while “The
Good and The Bad” plays out like a jam session in hell and
“The Burning Spear” sounds like a dance party in the
same place. Still, on tracks such as “I Dreamed I
Dream,” the birth of Sonic Youth’s hallmarks can be
heard: Moore’s crooning, Kim Gordon’s deadpan rants and
the minimalist soundscapes the two inhabit. The reissue contains
live tracks as well as a studio version of “Where the Red
Fern Grows.” To say the quality on the live tracks is poor is
a compliment ““ some would argue that the quality lends a
charm to Sonic Youth’s deliberately muddy sound, but for most
they will prove to be unlistenable. The studio cut of “Red
Fern,” however, is a worthy addition to a clumsy yet
intriguing debut EP on which a band is finding its feet. “The
Whitey Album,” the band’s only release under the
moniker Ciccone Youth, was the group’s bizarre, postmodern
tribute to Madonna, whom they had a fascination with in the
’80s. One would expect the album to consist of Sonic Youth
covers of Madonna songs, but it is mostly a series of bizarre noise
experiments. In fact, the only Madonna covers are
“Burnin’ Up,” redone by former Minutemen bassist
Mike Watt, and “Into the Groove(y),” performed by Sonic
Youth. The latter begins as a typically dirge-like, noisy song
before mixing in actual samples from the Madonna track in
mind-bending fashion. Few tracks resemble actual songs; the second
is titled “Silence” and is literally one minute and
three seconds of complete silence. But these tracks represent what
fans love about Sonic Youth ““ a willingness to try out
different sounds and tuning styles, structure be damned. The
album’s most bizarre moment comes in Gordon’s quirky
karaoke rendition of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to
Love,” which by itself makes the album worth listening to.
1995’s “Psychic Hearts” was frontman
Moore’s best solo album by a wide margin. The record is quite
the departure from what fans of Moore’s work with Sonic Youth
would expect ““ perhaps appropriately, the opening track,
“Queen Bee and Her Pals,” most resembles the work of
Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus in its lyrical styling and
eccentric rhythms. “Psychic Hearts” is straightforward
in every way that “The Whitey Album” is not, yet still
oozes edgy coolness with every note. For those dissatisfied with
Moore’s favoring of structure on “Psychic
Hearts,” however, “Elegy For All The Dead Rock
Stars” provides enough hypnotic noise to satisfy even the
most jaded Sonic Youth fan. Don’t be fooled by the absence of
Gordon, Ranaldo and Shelley ““ “Psychic Hearts” is
among the best work Moore has ever produced, Sonic Youth or not.
With these reissues coming just months before a new Sonic Youth
album, the time is right to pick up these albums and get a tangible
sense of where spontaneity and experimentation with musical styles
can lead.

“”mdash; Mark Humphrey