http://pitchforkmedia.com/tracks/06-04-25.shtml
Sonic Youth: "Incinerate"
genre:
indie rock
Old school SY fans hate this shit: Squall backgrounded, dissonance minimized, guitars locked and lissome. But the squall's still there, the dissonance essential, and the guitars wilder than you think. Behold the Sonic Youth Smart Car: maximum riff, minimum square area.
This same song on
Murray Street would have been waylaid in jam-land at three, perhaps four junctures; here, solo teams with vocal, coda becomes bridge, the verse gets last licks-- it's a three-minute template but it takes them five. I dug the last two records' yawning chasms-- edgeless battlefields on which the band played out antagonistic relationships such as elegant triple-lead filigrees vs. gale-force feedback, or Sonic Youth vs. obsolescence. But this is cool, too. The climactic ascension comes tightly wrapped; feedback enjoys its moment, and a moment's all it needs. This is Sonic Youth at their most virtuosic and ordered, and if that reads like a death sentence then you should probably give yr
Sister vinyl a rest already.
[Sam Ubl]
