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Rock Medicine
Saves the faint of heart
Sonic Swoon
Ageless rockers not for the faint of heart
By Jim AbramsSonic Youth have a new album, their 13th release, called Washing Machine. The last song is called "The Diamond Sea." If you have it, throw it on the hi-fi. If you don't, treat yourself and go buy it.
OK, now let's listen together. The first sound you hear is the hum of electricity filtering through the amplifiers. Then the click of drumsticks, and the song starts. One guitar echoes in glassy, descending notes, the other shimmers in a weave of wah-wah and reverb. Then the melody comes in: simple, almost uplifting. The song is pretty. But then it changes -- the rippling guitars get mean, the drums speed up, and suddenly it's a glaring, spiraling mess of sound and noise. The trance-out rhythmic pattern locks in, and the guitars spin chaotically until the song finally burns out, leaving a lone guitar sputtering on the periphery. It's some 19 minutes later. Listen again if you'd like.
Sonic Youth capped Tuesday's show at the Warfield with "The Diamond Sea." Live, the song translates with even greater intensity -- a bit more improvised, and therefore quite electric. The frenzied coalescence of dissonance and odd harmonies was accompanied by a kaleidoscopic light show: glittering strobes, huge flashing orbs that hung from the ceiling, and glimmering strings of tiny bulbs. The black-and-white shower of light left the audience gaping, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. It was so intense that I actually passed out. Yup, full-fledged black-out. Fainted. Woke up moments later on an inch-thick foam pad in the basement of the Warfield with the last bits of "The Diamond Sea" whirling in the background.
All of which leads to the point: in the history of late 20th-century rock, Sonic Youth matter. There isn't much more to say. And it doesn't have to be "The Diamond Sea." Go back and listen to the dissonant tension of "(She's in a) Bad Mood" from 1983's Confusion is Sex, the humming, pastoral sway of "Tom Violence" from 1986's EVOL, or the needling bite of "Catholic Block" from 1987's Sister. Conceived in New York amidst the showdown of the late '70s No-Wave and punk movements, they've willfully pooled the tonal experiments of such art-rock composers as Remko Scha, Rhys Clatham and Glenn Branca (both of Sonic Youth's guitar gurus, Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo, played in Branca's avant-garde "orchestra" in the late '70s and early '80s), and the outlandish energy and insistent riffing of bands like the Germs and the Stooges, in their search for the perfect amalgam of intellect and instinct. It's been a progression of extrapolations and non-linearity, always looking for the next plateau from which to jump. Sonic Youth have mattered from the start.
Which is why the show's practical purpose of highlighting material from Washing Machine sometimes seemed overshadowed by the importance of the band's repertoire as a whole -- you got the sense that it was history in the making. And it's not that the new work is sub-par in any sense. Indeed, the title track was the highlight of the set, a swirling 10-minute mini-epic which started jarring and chaotic, momentarily quieted, and finally devolved into an airy drone, complete with Renaldo's southern-style plucking. "Saucer-Like" hummed and whirred, winding up tautly before gliding along with syncopated delicacy. "Junkie's Promise" was creepy and relentless, revolving around Moore's scowling, Lou Reed-like vocals. Certainly the songs from Washing Machine are Sonic Youth's most pioneering since 1989's Daydream Nation, but previous material combined with current to reveal new aspects of a Euclidean whole. Sonic Youth's body of work stands together, arguably the most artistically important and influential collection of songs from the late '80s and early '90s. While other bands step ahead of themselves, ignoring their back-catalogue as they progress, Sonic Youth create each work on a different wavelength, each piece as vital as the next.
The band's confidence in its older material was obvious in its picks for the set list. Commencing with the one-two-three punch of "Tom Violence," "Catholic Block" and "Cotton Crown" (also from Sister) the band didn't get to new material until the middle of the show. Cuts from 1993's Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, also received their first public airing (the band didn't tour because of the birth of Moore and bassist Kim Gordon's baby, Coco Hayley Gordon Moore). "Starfield Road," powered by an adamant, pounding rhythm and the high-pitched flutter of distortion, even sent the ordinarily stationary Moore bouncing up and down. The ring and clang of 1993's sleeper alternative hit "Bull in the Heather" saw the audience doing the same.
So I regained consciousness in the concrete office of the Warfield's resident "Rock Med" (she was sooo hip, you know), and after drinking four large cups of Sprite, tried to convince her to let me go see the encore. She refused. Said that she would only let me go when my lips weren't white. So I watched Letterman's opening monologue on her TV and rejoined my party when the show was over, but I didn't care too much. Sonic Youth were worth the trouble.
Copyright 1995, The Daily Californian. All rights reserved.
UC Berkeley's Independent Student Newspaper.
This Story: http://server.berkeley.edu/DailyCal/Issues/11.10.95/
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