[Moshe]

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/music/r...h_sonic_youth/

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth

Ciccone Youth

The Whitey Album

Thurston Moore

Psychic Hearts

[Reissue]

(Geffen)

Rating: 6 / 8 / 7

US release date: 13 March 2006

UK release date: 2 April 2006


by Dave Heaton

Freedom Rock

In the public imagination, rock ‘n’ roll is tied to freedom. Elvis shakes his hips, teenagers scream for the Beatles like they’ve never screamed before, you get in the car, you hit the open road, you blare your music and ride off the edge of a cliff, free as a bird. You start a mosh pit, have wild sex, take drugs with abandon, destroy your enemies, do what you feel. You live fast, you die young, and so on and so forth.
Sonic Youth have one foot in that conventional (at this point) concept of rock ‘n’ roll freedom, but they simultaneously represent a tradition of freedom tied to the mind-expanding potential of art. They can be placed in a line of artists who followed their own impulses regardless of the strains of commerce or the dominant means of expression. They have as much in common with Fluxus, the Beat poets, the Pop artists, experimental filmmakers, conceptual modern-classic composers, free-jazz pioneers, and mystical poets as they do Chuck Berry and the Stones. They’re making rock music, but they’re also reaching for some kind of other place, trying to break past conventions and get to something new. They’re always straddled this line between rock and Art, between being a commercial rock band and being artistic adventurers always on a quest.
The story goes that Sonic Youth crossed some line into commercialism when they signed to Geffen Records in 1990, but the truth is they’ve been walking the same line right from the start. These reissues of three quite different Sonic Youth-related recordings reaffirm that feeling, giving a chance to experience the many dimensions of the musical universe the band has been exploring for the past quarter of a century.
Sonic Youth grew from the punk, no-wave, and art gallery scenes of late ‘70s NYC. Sonic Youth the band’s 1982 debut EP, was released on Neutral Records, run by avant garde musician Glenn Branca, who also brought Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo into the fold of his guitar ensembles. You’d expect Sonic Youth to sound especially intellectual, then...cold and experimental and heady. Yet the first line of the first song is “I’m not afraid to say I’m scared / in my bed I’m deep in prayer.” And that song. “Burning Spear”, also has a rhythmic, almost dance-oriented pulse to it.
In some ways Sonic Youth feels like it captures the essence of Sonic Youth. There’s the haunted feeling that would later occupy the entire Bad Moon Rising album. There’s a rock energy but it’s screwed around with, ripped down and then built back up. Kim Gordon’s vocals on “I Dreamed I Dream” have that same dream-poem quality of those on songs throughout the band’s discography ("fucking youth / working youth,” she repeats). The guitars slowly build in a particular way you can find on nearly every Sonic Youth release, up to and including their most recent album Sonic Nurse.
At the same time, Sonic Youth sounds first and foremost like a band in the midst of figuring out their personality. Drummer Richard Edson (who went on to act in films like Stranger Than Paradise and Do the Right Thing) plays in jazzy polyrhythms that fit awkwardly with the rest of the music, pointing them shakily toward worldbeat. Moore’s singing voice sounds underdeveloped compared even to their next record, 1983’s Confusion Is Sex. The songs themselves capture a ghostly, eerie aura but don’t have the ferocity and presence they would soon have….or that they had already, judging by the live recordings added to Sonic Youth for this reissue. The seven live tracks recorded in 1981, including several songs that aren’t on the EP, have a dark, nervous energy missing from the studio recordings. The sound quality isn’t perfect, but the recordings themselves surpass the EP in giving a sense of where Sonic Youth was coming from when they began, the way that they were taking this hardcore intensity and melding it to a heady, experimental way of thinking about rock.
Jump forward through Sonic Youth’s career about six years, past the four albums that cemented their style and grew it in an even more unique fusion of rock and art—Confusion Is Sex, Bad Moon Rising, Evol and Sister - and right before you reach their classic modern-sci-fi epic Daydream Nation you get to a “side project” that is as intriguing as any of the proper albums. Ciccone Youth’s The Whitey Album grew from a one-off single of Madonna covers that they did with bassist Mike Watt, reportedly to help him get over the death of his Minutemen bandmate D. Boon. The idea of stardom and the iconography of celebrity are themes explored often by Sonic Youth. Combine those with the interest in the intersection of pop song and experimental song destruction, and you get these Madonna covers: “Into the Groove(y)”, with Moore singing “Into the Groove” along with a sample of Madonna’s voice and a mish-mash of percussion and guitars, and “Burnin’ Up,” sung and played by Watt.
Both covers are part of The Whitey Album, and form both of that album’s pop music subtext, along with a brilliantly nonchalant Gordon-sung karaoke cover of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” Moore’s brief rap “Tuff Titty Rap”, the hip-hop tapestry feeling of “Hendrix Cosby”, and drum machines and samples strewn throughout. The Whitey Album is on the whole an example of the playful side of Sonic Youth’s experimentalism. The bulk of the album is devoted to jaunty instrumentals with a loose, goofy-funk quality about them, with titles like “Needle-Gun” and “March of the Ciccone Robots.” A sound collage approach meets fool-around jamming in some middle place that feels especially inspired. The scope of the album is wide enough to include a Ranaldo spoken piece ("Me & Jill"), a scattershot hip-hop-influenced re-do of Confusion Is Sex‘s “Making the Nature Scene”, junkyard instrumentals created from scraps of sounds from who-knows-where, and a minute of silence. In its devil-may-care approach to criss-crossing genres and ideas without a end goal in mind, The Whitey Album is reminiscent of Sonic Youth’s ‘90s/’00s experimental SYR EP series, but it’s more fun. In its own way, it feels like the essence of Sonic Youth, or an essence at least.
The notion that Sonic Youth take themselves too seriously is exploded not just by The Whitey Album, put by close listening to the band’s whole discography. Another similarly misguided notion is that Sonic Youth are all about the head, that their songs are intellectual exercises without heart. The band is more like a continuing example that songs can be intellectual, and visceral, and still in their own way emotional. Sure, you won’t find anything that could be described as sentimentality in Sonic Youth, but you’ll certainly find raw passion.
Thurston Moore’s 1995 solo album Psychic Hearts, the third of the new reissues, sometimes feels entirely ruled by passion. As its title indicates, it’s a collection of Valentine’s cards to imaginary women. At times it feels like an album-length apology to women for male arrogance and ignorance, as Moore directs song after song to women who’ve suffered abuse, who are struggling with life, who experience sexism in a harsh, halting way. Along with that Moore celebrates a few of his artistic heroes, through song title allusions like “Ono Soul” and “Patti Smith Math Scratch.”
It’s an altogether more personal album, one stylistically dominated by Moore’s Beat-like style of freestyle poetry and his driving, bluesy guitar playing (his book title Alabama Wildman comes to mind as an apt description of this album’s style). It feels like a relative of Sonic Youth’s 1994 album Experimental Jet Set, Trash, & No Star, thematically (picking up on the tone of songs like “Self-Obsessed and Sexee") and musically – that album grew from solo demos by Moore. But Psychic Hearts is much more forceful. Moore adopts one basic style and tone, and drives it until it explodes into vapor...that is, into a 20-minute instrumental “Elegy For All the Dead Rock Stars.”
Sonic Youth destroyed their idols (Kill Yr Idols), they feted them and goofed on them (Ciccone Youth), and here Moore cries for them. Those complex relations between rock stars and listeners are a constant theme in their music, and Sonic Youth has also consistently tried to redefine “rock musician” as someone who makes art, who exposes connections, explores streams of thought and sound, and does it all with the physicality and courage of extreme noise and hardcore punk. And they’re always evolving in this direction. For example, Moore has described the next Sonic Youth album, Rather Ripped, as pop music sounding like the theme song for Friends. The Ciccone Robots march on…

[finding nobody]

BUMP
i like. lots of info

[whorefrost]

i threw on Psychic Hearts last night whilst getting ready to go out... hadn't listened to it in a long time... forgot how damned good it was... and Hang Out has usurped Feathers as my fav track...

[Moshe]

http://pitchforkmedia.com/record-rev...c-hearts.shtml

Sonic Youth / Ciccone Youth / Thurston Moore
Sonic Youth / The Whitey Album / Psychic Hearts
[Neutral; 1982 / Blast First; 1988 / DGC; 1995; r: Geffen / Universal; 2006]
Rating: 8.2 / 7.8 / 7.6</B>

 

 

Another trio of remastered Sonic Youth-related reissues has surfaced, offering a glance at the band and its side projects amid this current period of serious downtown New York nostalgia and speculation. Why certain projects and albums were chosen over others isn't clear, but for now Geffen/Universal has spit-shined the 1982 self-titled debut EP, 1989's Madonna-fixated The Whitey Album (credited to Ciccone Youth), and Thurston's 1995 solo debut, Psychic Hearts. Beyond the requisite history lesson and catalogue gap-filling, the triad's dropped in anticipation of the band's 15th studio album, Rather Ripped, which is out in June, and maybe as a nod to Ecstatic Peace!, Moore's excellent experimental and noise label teaming with Universal.
All three albums have their moments, but the five-song debut gives the most band for your buck. Packaged with extensive (and worthwhile) liner notes from Byron Coley, Glenn Branca, original Sonic Youth drummer Richard Edson, and a note from Moore regarding the relation of reggae and Can to the tracks contained therein. Sonic Youth is also bolstered by seven live tracks and an early demo, all from 1981. Obviously more primitive than the quartet's later work, the recordings offer a ghostly, mesmerizing locked groove. My favorite aspect of the EP is the band's willingness to take its time: "Burning Spear" tries a hand at post-punk dub that swivels with Gordon's bass line and Edson's drum breaks. As Coley thoughtfully notes, that song's amazing sound of an airplane lift-off or wind filtering through a crumbled lofts is actually Ranaldo's "contact mic'd electric drill" filtered through wah. On the track, Moore's vocals are haunting and urgent, like he's pinned to mattress on the floor of his East Village apartment: "I'm not afraid to say I'm scared/ In my bed I'm deep in prayer/ I trust the speed/ I love the fear."
This is SY at their most icy; it's an erudite, windswept set, wrapping distortion inside danceable half-frozen Liquid Liquid beats. Even the EP's hand-drum rocker, "I Don't Want to Push It", is a gust of slush in an Bowery puddle. Moore takes over bass duties on the lengthy, jumpy instrumental closer, "The Good and the Bad". Elsewhere, the bonus live stuff swelters: a super elastic "Burning Spear" is impressive and a rip-roaring version of "She Is Not Alone" contrasts the restrained studio take.
If Sonic Youth's a chilly midnight haze, The Whitey Album tilts toward a confetti-lined karaoke jamboree. Finding the crew, along with Mike Watt (who offers liner notes penned in 1993), adopting Madonna's actual surname, Ciccone Youth are hopped-up on hand claps, drum machinations, lo-fi industrial, repetitious loops, and wily cover tunes. All that, and you get to hear Moore rap. Critics tend to highlight the sight gags like the meta "Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu", with Gordon and friend talking over a stereo about the possibilities of managing Dinosaur (Mascis shows up with a humongous guitar wail), that minute of Cagean silence, and Watt's cow-polk cover version of "Burnin' Up", which hits me like a disco take on his cover of Daniel Johnston's "Walking the Cow". (Historical note: Greg Ginn lays down an extra guitar.) That's fine-- these oddities are pretty choice-- but there are much better musical bits.
Something you might not remember: The Whitey Album's packed with gorgeous instrumentals like "Macbeth", which piles up drum machines, fuzzing guitars, and catchy Cure-like chord rings. Opener "Needle-Gun" is Fat Albert-style No-Wave. There's also a bit of self-sampling: "Platoon II"'s echo drums and gentle guitar drabs are a vocal-free take of the Gordon-fronted "G-Force". Of course, you'll also hear Gordon's cheesy, but wonderfully droll "Addicted to Love" and their most famous cover, an echo-dub implosion of Madonna's "Into the Groove", recast as "Into the Groovey".
Released after Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star and joined by Steve Shelley on drums and Tim Foljahn on second guitar, Moore's femme-themed solo debut, Psychic Hearts, is a collection of often-beautiful sunset guitar rock. Of his vocal turns, my favorite is the caffeinated, teen-angst/dysfunction of the propulsive title track. Moore's vocals are also particularly swoon-worthy on the whispery "Pretty Bad" and breathy "Ono Soul".
Most of Psychic Hearts, however, works because of the simple repetitions of instrumentals like lilting opener "Blues From Beyond the Grave" and the slightly exeunt and the gently paranoid "(I Got a) Catholic Block" patterning that surfaces between Moore's voice in "Feathers". The centerpiece is the 20-minute instrumental exeunt, "Elegy for All the Dead Rock *s". The track's distinct movements mingle fluidly, swerving into a sideways cascade before bursting and blooming until notes sharpen and a final tidal wave arcs and releases. The noise implosions of its final third are anti-climactic, but after some gentle plucks and slides, Moore grabs his pick and glides into that dark night as gorgeously as he began, only this time with more triumphal drums. God, Sonic Youth's catalogue is vast. For even the biggest fans, it can take a reissue to suggest refocusing on something you've previously taken for granted. (Proust fans are nodding in agreement.) Psychic Hearts was, for whatever reason, still pretty embedded in my memory, but I had mostly forgotten the precise, trashcan regality of the EP. The Whitey Album, something I'd relegated to the Mr. T Experience section of my memory, was the biggest surprise: Collecting dust in my closet, this fucker has some incredibly catchy and flat-out kick ass and moving moments. If you've never heard any of this stuff, take a peak at what your guitar heroes were up to when they were a tad younger. If, like me, you assumed you'd moved past it: Go back and realize you haven't.

[Inhuman]

I just picked up a copy of the Whitey Album today, and I think it's great. SO many music styles in it, it's great. It's like mixing 10 different genres together into one album. Thurston rapping was interesting to hear. I just got home and listened to the whole thing, including Silence. Great album! I'm furthering my knowledge of Sonic Youth; I never knew that they changed that much since their first albums.

[Moshe]

http://www.tinymixtapes.com/musicrev...onic_youth.htm

 

Sonic Youth / The Whitey Album [Ciccone Youth] / Psychic Hearts [Thurston Moore]
Geffen, 2006 (reissues)
rating: 3.5/5
reviewer: olskooly

Geffen's decision to reissue Sonic Youth's debut self-titled EP concurrently with Ciccone Youth's The Whitey Album and Thurston Moore's Psychic Hearts was a curious one. None of the original three releases is, in and of itself, a truly monumental recording, and they certainly do not measure up to any of Sonic Youth's albums subsequent to 1987's Sister. Nonetheless, these 2006 Geffen reissues provide insight into Sonic Youth as a band during three distinct periods.

Sonic Youth marked the 1982 emergence of the band into the indie rock world. Primitive drumming (courtesy of Richard Edson, the musician-turned-actor recognizable to most as the sinister parking garage attendant from Ferris Bueller's Day Off) and dark, jagged shards of guitar were the order of the day on this heavily post-punk-oriented release. Though it differs greatly from the more stylistically distinctive latter-day Sonic Youth albums, Sonic Youth features a guitar sound that is very clearly Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo attempting to both define and refine their embryonic, dissonant sound. Allegedly performed entirely without any of the band's characteristic alternate tunings, the record does contain traces of the unusual guitar effects that would become staples on future Sonic Youth releases. Surprisingly, in spite of Thurston Moore's primal and frequently unrecognizable vocals, Kim Gordon's singing voice on this EP is as dependable as ever. Despite the EP's leanings toward post punk and new wave, Sonic Youth does not contain a single track conventional enough to be considered radio-friendly. The reissue also includes seven live tracks performed at New York's New Pilgrim Theatre.

Although it falls, chronologically, between Sister and 1988's holy-grail-of-indie-rock-records Daydream Nation, Ciccone Youth's The Whitey Album remains something of a Sonic Youth anomaly to this day. Though it is technically a collaborative effort that resulted in something of a joke (Minutemen's Mike Watt is featured on the recording in a limited capacity, as is Dinosaur Jr.'s J. Mascis), The Whitey Album is in essence a Sonic Youth album. For those too young to remember or give a shit, 1988 was a dismal, suck-ass time for popular music. As Ciccone Youth (named, of course, after Madonna's proper surname), the group set out to simultaneously subvert the pop idiom and poke fun at the Top 40 music of the era. The album's two immediately recognizable tracks include a strange karaoke rendition of Robert Palmer's “Addicted to Love,” provocatively sung by a sardonic Kim Gordon, and an oddly unsettling Madonna cover, here titled “Into the Groove(y),” with vocals provided by Moore. Elsewhere, fractured No Wave noise rock over cheesy drum machine beats and tongue-in-cheek, old-school raps provide the filler for the rest of the album (which, though by turns challenging and borderline unlistenable, is at the very least worth being exposed to, if for no other reason than to simply ascertain just how this curiosity compares to the band's other recordings). The Whitey Album is also, at times, an unusually funny release.

1994 showed Sonic Youth on temporary hiatus due to Kim Gordon's pregnancy with her (and Thurston's) daughter, Coco. In the interim, Thurston Moore recorded Psychic Hearts. The album consists of basically one half of Sonic Youth (SY drummer Steve Shelley mans the skins) with additional guitar provided by Tim Foljahn of Half Japanese. Structurally, Moore's solo outing is quite similar to Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star and Dirty, the two Sonic Youth albums which preceded the recording of Psychic Hearts. And while the Ciccone Youth record poked fun at Top 40 radio dreck, Moore, freed from the constraints of recording with a well-established band, takes the opportunity to commit to tape some of his most pop-inflected recordings to date. Psychic Hearts is a long set of taut, concise pop-punk (albeit with a manifestly Sonic Youth edge) that, while not as memorable as Moore's output with his full-time band, is enjoyable and melodic. The album's highlight is the twenty-minute-plus closing track “Elegy for All the Dead Rock Stars,” a beautiful and stunning instrumental that, despite its length, is surprisingly engaging. Moore's solo effort is unfortunately rendered somewhat forgettable due to the fact that it audibly lacks the dynamic that is so patently ubiquitous on his work with Sonic Youth up until that point.

While Geffen are in the process of reissuing comprehensive two-disc editions of the classic Sonic Youth albums (which they began with Dirty and continued with Goo), they are to be commended for reissuing these much sought-after and seldom-heard Sonic Youth projects. A valuable part of any indie rock collection.

Sonic Youth:
1. The Burning Spear
2. I Dreamed I Dream
3. She Is Not Alone
4. I Don't Want To Push It
5. The Good and the Bad
6. Hard Work
7. Where the Red Fern Grows
8. The Burning Spear
9. Cosmopolitan Girl
10. Loud and Soft
11. Destroyer
12. She Is Not Alone
13. Where the Red Fern Grows

The Whitey Album:
1. Needle-Gun
2. (Silence)
3. G-Force
4. Platoon II
5. Macbeth
6. Me & Jill/Hendrix Cosby
7. Burnin' Up
8. Hi! Everybody
9. Children of Satan/Third Fig
10. Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening To Neu
11. Addicted To Love
12. Moby-Dik
13. March of the Ciccone Robots
14. Making the Nature Scene
15. Tuff Titty Rap
16. Into the Groove(y)
17. Macbeth II (Hidden Track)

Psychic Hearts:
1. Queen Bee and Her Pals
2. Ono Soul
3. Psychic Hearts
4. Pretty Bad
5. Patti Smith Math Scratch
6. Blues From Beyond the Grave
7. See-Through Play/Mate
8. Hang Out
9. Feathers
10. Tranquilizer
11. Staring Statues
12. Cindy (Rotten Tanx)
13. Cherry's Blues
14. Female Cop
15. Elegy for All the Dead Rock Stars

[Neongod]

" While Geffen are in the process of reissuing comprehensive two-disc editions of the classic Sonic Youth albums "

I wonder if there's any truth to that.

[gmku]

Originally Posted by Inhuman

I just picked up a copy of the Whitey Album today, and I think it's great. SO many music styles in it, it's great. It's like mixing 10 different genres together into one album. Thurston rapping was interesting to hear. I just got home and listened to the whole thing, including Silence. Great album! I'm furthering my knowledge of Sonic Youth; I never knew that they changed that much since their first albums.

Agree! That album is a LOT of fun. And there's some good spacey soundscape kinds of stuff, like Needle-Gun.

I don't understand why critics rate the first SY self-titled thing so low. I think it's great. It's true, they depart from this sound rather quickly--mostly it's the drumming that seems out of place. But I also think you can pick up on elements they carried forward into later releases. It helps complete the SY picture for me.