agree about the fear at the start of dog... to me the guitar work on inhuman is just spot on, sounds like locusts swarming with metal wings...this record is what brought me to the band and keeps me with em.. would like to see another scary record like this one or evol

it's my favourite sy album-so good i got the t-shirt

I remember first buying CIS online with two other cds (can't remember them now) and I almost couldn't get it just because it was called Confusion is sex.

on a side note: this also happened with In utero, I almost couldn't get it because of the cover. Back in 6th grade I think.

cis is unique, dark, raw, (she's in a) bad mood, such a epic to me.
even better live in a small club (what i saw in video). and it was at the time when i was learning how to walk, hehe.

i think GGDDEbEb was only used on the KYI EP

Inhuman is such a great song. I used to cover Inhuman with my sister. She played the slide bass and I just put my guitar out of tune and played random shit and shouted the lyrics. It was great.

Confusion is Next is funny.

Who is the 2nd guy from the right?

Sonic Youth Is Rock! Sonic Youth Revived The Rock!!!! Sonic Youth Rebirthed The Rock!!!! Sonic Youth Is Rock!

Sonic Life!

i HAVE SEEN MY FRIENDS GET INTO THE DRONE OF IT UNTIL i WANNA BE YOUR DIOG STARTS AND THEN THEY SHIT THEMSELVES!!!!!!!

sonic youth rule all. CIS is wonderful. I first heard it in 1987. it erased forcibly every stupid idea I had about rock music.

That's what I'm saying. It's fucking haunting.....I love it. PROTECT ME YOU!!!

Protect Me You is fucking scary as hell. I love it.

I burnt it for a friend, and after listening to it he never wanted to listen Sonic Youth ever again.

I can't get over Kim's style. Her femininity seems so underplayed. Like she really went to long lengths to make herself look unattractive. Not that she should to whore it up. I'm not saying that. I'm just remarking on the stylistic change that happend a few years later when she really started playing up her female sexuality (wearing skirts, loses the glasses, different haircuts, etc.).

^People change man....so do styles.

"Confusion is Next and after that is the truth" And the truth is....CIS is one of the best, darkest, musical statements ever to be put to magnetic tape. I can't even begin to expound on what I thought and felt after listening to it for the 1st time. The experience is beyond words. Second only to Daydream Nation in terms of sheer impact and aural assualt.

it scares me

One of the scariest albums ever made.

They so should play this album for ATP don't look back fest. As said before it's weird to see Kim in pictures from that era then look at pictures a few years after and hell pictures from before CIS.

I like Sclavunos' drumming. There's a drum fill going back into the verse from the middle eight of Inhuman that's one of my favorite drumming moments.

I think it's their best album, by far. Everything about it is perfect. It's genuinely SCARY at times. I think they took the sound of Theoretical Girls, Red Transistors, Mars, Teenage Jesus, etc. and kinda made it their own, twisting it around and infusing some genuinely appealing melodies/riffs.

I've always been enamoured by this album -- it was the first one I ever heard, at 14 years old in an attic. It was over 100 degrees. You couldn't even move because it was so hot. Me and a friend and his girlfriend layed on the dusty wooden attic floor playing the album from beginning to end on a beat-up stereo. I was hooked right away. The music seemed to match the heat perfectly... the music seemed to exist in sort of a weird mirage of sound.

I replaced my copy of Confusion yesterday, getting a REAL copy after playing the burnt copy for 10 years. Man, I bet I listened to that copy he burned me that day a thousand times.

I just read an interview with Jim Sclavunos (of Grinderman), who played drums on this album. This is interesting..

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?not...50263209715434

Roch Parisien's Rocon Communications
You're on! We'll be on the undercard at the Grinderman show in Montreal...
Meanwhile, describe your association with influential NYC post-punk band Sonic Youth.

Jim Sclavunos
Lydia Lunch introduced me to Sonic Youth. She was pimping me out in those days for which I am quite grateful. She tried to get me into The Birthday Party after Phill Calvert quit, but Mick Harvey ended up assuming the position. Anyway, I digress. I recorded the first album "Confusion is Sex" with Sonic Youth, It was not smooth sailing by any means but I think the end result was really good. I had to leave the band due to friction between a certain member of the band and my first wife. I hope that is a tantalizing tidbit…

My favorite along with Dirty and Goodby 20th Century.

I also need a new CIS tshirt. My current one shrunk and has little holes in it.

Yeah, is it the black one with the album cover on it...? That's the one I have too, it's faded and has holes but I still wear it every week.

Yeah, that's the one.

I don't have a problem with the holes, but the shrinking i can't stand.

I fell asleep listening to "Sonic Death" (not uncommon) the other day, but I had set it on 'repeat' somehow so it just played over and over while I slept... Lee's behind-the-bridge string picking during the outro of "She's in a Bad Mood" became heavily incorporated into this dream I was having, where I was walking through town and became aware of some kind of power station tower (which does actually exist) that caused the air to visibly and audibly vibrate with some type of electro-magnetism while that riff played over and over...basically this loud whirring hum was actually penetrating my dream as if it were audible on the city street and people just accepted it...hard to explain but legitimately terrifying. Some days I think that may be my favorite Sonic Youth song.

That's amazing, Chris.

Sonic Death is amazing -- one of my favorite SY releases... I can't imagine falling asleep to it.. though the two worst things to fall asleep to are Confusion (if you fall asleep in the beginning, that is, and are woke up by "I WANNA BE YOUR DOG" in track 3) and Experimental, Jet Set, etc (the hidden track).

^ oh god I remember first hearing that secret track on EJSTNS and it freaked me out. I blasting it and when it finally came it was super loud so I turned down the volume. but since they mess with the volume on that track it just had me turning the volume up and down.

I bought EVOL and Bad Moon Rising vinyls 1993. I thought I try to search Confusion -vinyl, but then I thought (maybe 1994, it was after Experimental jet set) it was very difficult to find it on vinyl, so I ordered sst Cd from some musicshop. I was quite suprised when first song was Bad Mood. There had been Sonic Youth discography in finnish music magazine and there was said Inhuman is first song, then world look red and the last is Shaking hell. And in the cd back was also this order. I thought there had happened some mistake when they put it on the cd. Then I got (maybe 1999) Blast first re-release vinyl and there was also same order than cd! But with these pages I have noticed that there is correct order in the cd.

My opinion is that Confusion is very great album, but not as great as EVOL and Sister for example. I thought they were then searchin their style and found it in EVOL. But confusion is still so full of energy that there hasn´t been that much in Sonic Youth after that. Maybe their young age in that time is some reason to that?

My favorite songs from Confusion: Bad Mood (It´s very hard to me imagine better start from album), Freezer/I wanna, Shaking Hell, Inhuman, World looks red, Confusion is next.

If you ever wondered why the tracklist begins with Inhuman, it's because on the original LP, the label of side one had a picture of the cover, and the label of side two had the tracklist of side 2 labelled "this:", followed by the tracklist of side 1 labelled "that:" - but when they copied this for the CD, they eliminated the 'this' and 'that' identifiers but left the track list in side 2/side 1 order.

Fascinating eh?

Some may think this is very boring, but I love the details that is associated with rock music!

But into my question about that tracklist: Do you mean that in the original album Inhuman is first song on the second side? Because in my blast first re-release it´s the last song of first side and world looks red is first song in the second side. That also confused me a little bit when I got the vinyl.

By the way, on my re-release there is picture of the cover on the both sides labels and there is no track list at all, not even in the cover or paper bag. I took a copy of the cd:s gatefold before I sold the cd away.

When I first bought this record I didn't like it at all, and didn't listen to it for years, so my vinyl copy of it was in pretty good conditions until about 3 years ago, when it suddenly hit me how great this record is.
The day I bought it I remember very well because I was expecting a whole batch of the earliest SY records arriving at my friend's record shop, so I skipped college and made my way there in the
morning, where we'd often spend time talking crap and listening to new arrivals. After I left his shop, on my home, I decided to make my way to another friend's house with the records in tow, and sat down in the basement of her house, where she'd make clothes and hats to sell at various local events. Since I couldn't wait to put a SY record on, plus she was into them herself, I put Confusion is Sex on and sat down drinking beer. In retrospect I can understand why it didn't grab me at first, at the time I was really into bands like Neubauten, so this badly recorded mess playing on a not so decent turntable failed to make an impression on me that it took me 15 years to get rid of. And I'm glad I did.

One of my all-time favorite albums. I will never forget the first time I heard Inhuman, it blew my fucking mind. The album as a whole makes me think of abandoned places and smoke-filled underground clubs. CIS (+ Kill yr Idols) probably opened my mind for a darker kind of music. It played a major role in my musical evolution. It is partly responsible for me getting into good old Post-Punk and furthermore into Goth-Rock.

Yeah, that's a good point...for answers to these questions and more, I would take a look here:

http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/lp/lp1.html

Or I could answer them now, since I have the Blast First edition too, and you're right, the labels are just the cover of the album - it's the original Neutral vinyl that has the 'this/that' I mentioned above. "World Looks Red" is the first song on my side 2 as well, but some/all Zensor pressings have "Inhuman" as the first song on side 2 (and I can only assume the Neutral versions do as well, given the label...but I don't know!).

I'll mention this here because I see I haven't gotten around to adding it on the site yet, but while the album cover is indeed taken from a very early SY gig poster, that poster is a modification of an earlier Arcadians poster and you can still see part of Dog Eat Dog's name where they scratched it out and later wrote "Confusion is Sex" (and then "Kill Yr Idols"!).

i felt in love with joy divison during the last 3 years. the first time i heard closer i thought, hey this sounds a little bit like confusion is sex.

listen to both records from the beginning to the end and you get my point.

what else than confusion is next is as dark as joy division can i say ? hmm even the bass driven sound is similiar.

i think right now they have changed. i don´t expect another record like confusion is sex.listen to the eternal its the opposite and a name of a joy division song on their last album closer.

forgive me
:-)

I felt in love with Joy Division 1989. Sonic Youth came into my life a year later. In my opinion JD and SY are not similiar (maybe there is not that much melodies in JD as there is SY especially since EVOL), but they have something in common. And Confusion and Unknown pleasures and also closer have a lot in common. Maybe Confusion is a little bit aggressive and also more chaotic than JD albums, but the feeling on the base of these albums is quite same.

When I think albums that have same spirit as Confusion is sex, Stooges Raw Power, Velvet Underground White Heat/White Light and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion first album come into my mind. Of course Jon Spencer is much more blues-rock oriented, but especially the first album is as wild and also mainly dark as confusion.

same sound as confusion is sex i would say closer. the first song on closer for example sounds so much like confusion is sex.
same spirit ? all the negative creeps have somehow the same spirit

it´s youst in chase of sonic youth it was more some kind of art concept. in chase of ian it was related to his real live, some kind of rockn roll suicide

This was my second record I purchased after dirty, I fell in love with it immediately. The ones I loved the most where Shaking Hell, Inhuman, and The World Looks Red. Those three songs made me fall in love with them.

I have understood, that there are people in this gossip who have the original neutral vinyl. If I´m right, could someone who have that vinyl say, is Inhuman first song in the second side or last in the first? Of course it´s not the most important thing in the world but I just want to know.