I agree with you about bad moon rising and confusion is sex but not evol. there are of course songs that have no definable structure but something like starpower or expressway have far more definable structures than anything they had done previously. as a whole sister is more "convetnional" but not the marked contrast the writer makes it out to be

No, I don't carry that sort of bias.

if you really listen to SISTER you realise there are NO standart strong structures. songs have no choruses (schizophrenia, chatolic block...)
sonsgs meander and stop (PCH) and songs fade away like feedback squalor (pipeline...) ....

:D

evol is much more melodic imo.
both albums are great btw. probably my all time sy favs alongside bmr.

i think NME was going down the list of make-our-rag-more-credible-and-intelligent bands and SY came up. so Hamish, or whoever was assigned to write this under his name, did a crash course on pre-Geffen SY. DDN would be too obvious of an album, considering its press over the past year. almost everyone, upon listening to their first few records for the first time would think it's directionless noise. but 'Hamish' makes it obvious he just simply glazed over the records, thought Schiz was a nice ditty and decided to run with this record. didn't bother to note the progressions the band made from record to record; instead he just lumps all pre-Sister albums into one category of garbage, and essentially insults readers who liked the band before Sister. Nevermind that SY was part of an important artistic movement in the early 80s with a strong following or that SY were touring Europe since 1983. this was just a sloppy, one dimentional, Cliff note researched piece.......

thanks

couldnt agree more!

That article is one of the worst things I've ever read... holy shit... "Thurston's vocals on Pipeline/Kill Time"

...


riiighht.....

...I think that's pushing it a bit.

My god. I first got into 'noise' by reading an article about it in the Record Mirror, of all things. Articles like that aren't meant to be definitive; they're meant to introduce you to something. I'll bet everyone who's read or commented on the Sister article already owns the album. I really do believe that 99% of people here would secretly rather nobody mentioned Sonic Youth outside of the hallowed confines of this site.

That's why the most interesting parts of this site are the non-sonic sections.

Not quite. If NME did a decent (current) interview with and article about Sonic Youth, I'd be more than ecstatic. And likewise if they did a retrospective glossy special on 1980s alt-rock and printed some "vintage" interviews. But the article they did just seemed lazy and unlikely to entice anyone to give "Sister" a listen.